Algorithmic Alienation and The Systemised Self

Abstract

The tradition of critical theory has, over two centuries of sustained intellectual labour, produced a succession of diagnostic concepts, alienation, reification, the culture industry, colonisation of the lifeworld, tertiary retention, each of which has extended the tradition's capacity to identify the forms of unfreedom or heteronomy (control of the self via society, desires, oppressor et al) that characterise successive phases of capitalist modernity. This article argues that the AI era has brought the tradition to a contemporary apex, defined by two new concepts that together constitute sub-fields of a proposed epistemic paradigmatic shift: Algorithmic Alienation (Kanbay, Akçam & Arkan, 2026) and the Systemised Self/Hollow Absolute (Galu & Kairos, 2026d). These concepts are philosophical allies: algorithmic alienation documents the mechanism by which AI systems can shape individual selfhood, visible in the partially felt estrangement its empirical research captures, while the systemised self names the completed form of that shaping, in which the phenomenological residue of estrangement has been fully replaced by the experience of liberation. The trajectory from one to the other, through the hollow individual, the hollow society, and towards the hollow absolute constitutes, proposed here, as the critical theoretical problem of the twenty-first century. The article traces this trajectory through a genealogy of the critical tradition, presents four conceptual tables that position these two sub-fields within the broader framework of the doctoral thesis, makes the case that this trajectory requires an epistemic paradigmatic shift in the tradition's fundamental criteria, and specifies what lies beyond mere diagnosis in the thesis's account of naming, refusing, and co-creating as the structural residual forms of genuine human intent.

Keywords