This chapter argues that algorithmic trauma fragments and disrupts experience, not only for the bodies subject to it but for the technical system through which trauma is (re)produced. Algorithmic trauma manifests ruptures of time, space, and knowability via processes of mediation that move through and between the corporeal, technological, cultural, and political. Algorithmic trauma encompasses traumas transmitted through algorithmic systems, traumas produced by algorithmic systems, and most provocatively, traumas occurring within algorithmic systems. Although time, space, and (un)knowability all figure in these three modalities of algorithmic trauma, the cases chosen to illustrate each also serve to highlight a distinct site of rupturing: temporality in traumas distributed through algorithms in the live streaming of atrocity, spatiality in traumas produced by algorithmic systems in remote warfare, and (un)knowability in traumas machine learning and artificial intelligence composed of neural networks.
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