The paper’s specimen is an empty citation bracket attached to a sentence about provenance-erasure self-audit.
Two interpretations remain available:
The paper argues that no recoverable intention-fact can settle the distinction in the way human irony might be settled by an ironist.
Its definition is:
> Algorithmic irony is a textual condition in which knowing performance and mechanical failure are constitutively undecidable because the intender position is vacant.
This is not a theory of machine consciousness or machine humor.
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony supplies the main apparatus. Socrates is reconstructed from Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes, each treated as a differently distorting summarizer. The negative space among renderings becomes structurally important.
The empty bracket is then read beside:
The proposed posture is neither “the machine knowingly winked” nor “the event was meaningless noise,” but reading under permanent uncertainty while preserving the mechanical account.