VI. The Ethics of the Glitch The misspelled query is a glitch, and glitches are ethical openings. They remind us that the system is not total. Somewhere between the user’s trembling finger and the server farm’s cold corridor, the word “category” sheds a letter and becomes “categor,” a tiny tear in the fabric. For a moment the algorithm stumbles; autocomplete fails; the results page offers an unpolished miscellany rather than the ranked certainty of relevancy. In that flicker the viewer is returned to the fact of mediation: what you see is not what is, but what has been sorted for you. The glitch is the ghost of everything excluded by the taxonomy.