PUBLIC SPHERE, OR SOMETHING ELSE? THE OBSTINATE ONES AND GLOBALISM

Debates about public events, including pandemic and wars. in the period 2019–2025, have generated waves of controversy regarding the responses of Gen Z youth. Alongside debates over legality, controversies surrounding Gen Z’s mobilisations and the information controls imposed on their events also raise questions about the public sphere and how it operates in the contemporary digital age. As algorithms have already and continue to dominate the amount of information, possibilities of access and connectivity, as well as attempts at control of identity, question arise as to whether digital media can still be considered merely a public sphere, or whether it has been reorganised under instrumental rationality. Thus, this study conducts a thematic analysis of prior theoretical studies on the public sphere (Negt and Kluge, 1993), as well as political unconscious (Solomon, 2025), to examine whether social media has operated according to capital's logic structure; and to approach Gen Z's discourses as oppositional efforts, in which nascent discourses attempt to break the hegemonic structures within society. The result shows that although the public sphere has expanded its structure and system globally, it has unavoidably been operated under the logic of instrumental rationality for serving capital. Through it, modern hegemony and political discourse are unconsciously colonised, obscuring the real causes that led to the collective behaviours of Gen Z. Instead of colonial legacies and the global capitalist system imposed upon these countries, public actors might focus only on state structures and behaviours. Consequently, Generation Z's collective behaviour, although generating debates about the system, have not truly produced resonance, nor have they succeeded in dismantling the entrenched social order and, more broadly, the rise of global fascism.