For anyone old enough to have watched the original 1987 Verhoeven RoboCop, surely the word glitch is permanently associated for the hyper-violent scene where th

For anyone old enough to have watched the original 1987 Verhoeven RoboCop, surely the word glitch is permanently associated for the hyper-violent scene where the enforcement droid ED-209 is demonstrated as a massive fail, only to be summed up by the project owner as a “glitch”. A scene that was outrageously violent in the theatrical release and even moreso in the director’s cut. I know Verhoeven’s perspective was to use violent satire to speak about fascism, and the increasing militarization and technology-adoption of police forces — themes that are even more topical today. I think your description of how glitch is used today, as a folksy (and ultimately dishonest) non-threatening way to describe a failure while stressed-out engineers scramble to prop-up a half-finished system, directly captures the ED-209 scene — where people seek to mislead about the true situation through the use of the word “glitch”.