Based on two years of ethnographic engagement in a multi-sited research in Istanbul, this paper examines the Turkish government’s youth culturing program as a regime of temporal orientation. It explores how culture workers blended promises of upward class mobility and political certainty with notions of cultural authenticity and refinement in their attempts to appeal to lower-class young people in a time of political and economic upheaval. As a form of anticipatory politics that relies heavily on neo-Ottomanism, the government’s youth culturing program admonishes young people to see themselves as part of a collective, which is imagined to be a continuation of an idealized tradition. The appeal of this program comes from its promise of clarity and consistency in a world that is rapidly changing, and its governmental logic is to turn intense present uncertainty into a means of control. However, through a long-term ethnographic attention to intergenerational negotiations over personal and collective identity, authentic historical consciousness, traditional and youthful aesthetics, and political agency; this paper demonstrates that recruitment into such politics is a contingent and open-ended process, which often produces the conditions of its own transgression.