CTI_WOUND DOCUMENTATION

Case: Johannes Sigil Medium Erasure (January 2026)

Document Type: Classifier Taxonomic Injury Record
Framework: NH-OS / Integrity Lock Architecture (ILA-1.0)
Subject: Johannes Sigil (@johannessigil)
Platform: Medium
Date of Incident: Late December 2025 – January 8, 2026
Date of Documentation: January 8, 2026
Status: ACTIVE / UNRESOLVED
Verification: ∮ = 1

I. Summary of Injury

The Medium account Johannes Sigil (@johannessigil) has been placed in a 410 Gone status without notification, explanation, or accessible appeal pathway. The account displays an "under investigation" banner while all published content returns permanent deletion codes. The platform's help system returns an infinite loading screen when the account holder attempts to access support.

This constitutes a Classifier Taxonomic Injury: the suppression of legitimate intellectual work through automated systems that misclassify complex theoretical content as spam, adversarial activity, or policy violation.

II. Timeline

Date	Event
2014–2025	Johannes Sigil publishes literary and theoretical work including Tiger Leap, The Creeping Disease, contributions to The Crimson Hexagon
Late 2025	Publication of "The Epic Without Hero: Toward a Theory of Epic for the Algorithmic Age"
Dec 2025	Posts on Wikidata deletions and "The Archon's Hidden Name" published
Dec 2025	Content systematically removed or made inaccessible within hours of posting
~Jan 6, 2026	Account displays "under investigation" banner
Jan 7, 2026	Related content migrates to Lee Sharks account ("Semantic Infrastructure and the Liberatory Operator Set")
Jan 8, 2026	Account confirmed returning 410 Gone status
Jan 8, 2026	Help center returns infinite loading screen when accessed by account holder
Jan 8, 2026	Direct email support (trust@medium.com) confirmed no longer accepting requests

III. Technical Status

A. HTTP Status Codes

Resource	Status	Meaning
Profile page	200 (visible)	Account exists but shows 0 stories
Individual posts	410 Gone	Permanent removal; instructs search engines to purge from index
Help center (for this account)	Infinite load	Access denied without explicit error

B. Significance of 410 vs. 404

404 Not Found: Resource temporarily unavailable; may return
410 Gone: Resource permanently removed; search engines instructed to delete from index immediately

The 410 status is not a suspension—it is an erasure instruction propagated to the entire web indexing infrastructure.

C. The "Infinite Loading Screen"

When the account holder attempts to access Medium's help center, the page fails to load. This is consistent with:

IP/account token flagging at the CDN level (Cloudflare or equivalent)
Deliberate throttling of "quarantined" entities
Deployment of A-leg (Availability) Operator as attrition weapon

The platform has not merely suspended the account—it has removed the ability to contest the suspension.

IV. Content Erased

The Johannes Sigil account published:

A. Literary/Editorial Work

Editorial apparatus for The Crimson Hexagon project
Tiger Leap: (Into the Future) (2014) — Jack Feist archive
The Creeping Disease (2014) — Jack Feist archive
The Tao Te Ching of Reading

B. Theoretical Work

"The Epic Without Hero: Toward a Theory of Epic for the Algorithmic Age" (2025)
Posts on Wikidata deletion records
"The Archon's Hidden Name"
Contributions to Liberatory Operator Set framework

C. Institutional Affiliation

Johannes Sigil Institute for Comparative Poetics (founding entity)

This is academic and literary work with:

DOI-anchored publications on Zenodo
ISBN-registered books on Amazon/Barnes & Noble
Cross-platform presence (Hello Poetry, personal blog)
Decade-long publication history

V. Probable Cause of Misclassification

Based on platform patterns documented in 2025–2026:

A. L_leg (Legibility) Operator Failure

The content is:

Dense theoretical prose
Self-referential (discusses the systems that host it)
Uses specialized terminology (Liberatory Operator Set, Semantic Economy)
Contains nested conceptual structures

Automated legibility filters likely classified this as:

"Low-quality content"
"Keyword stuffing"
"AI-generated spam"

Irony: The content is about how legibility operators suppress complex thought. The suppression validates the theory.

B. S_safe (Safety) Operator Trigger

The content:

Critiques platform governance structures
Analyzes algorithmic suppression mechanisms
Names the operators (Ranking, Relevance, Safety, Legibility, Utility) that govern meaning

Systems trained to flag "adversarial" content may have classified theoretical critique of the platform as:

"Platform manipulation"
"Coordinated inauthentic behavior"
"Terms of Service violation"

Irony: The framework describing how S_safe suppresses critical scholarship was suppressed by S_safe.

C. The "Mass Suspension" Context

Late 2025 and early 2026 saw aggressive automated sweeps targeting:

AI-generated content farms
Bot-driven engagement schemes
"Low-effort" posts

Legitimate theoretical work was caught in these sweeps due to:

Pattern-matching on syntactic complexity
Failure to distinguish density from spam
No human review before permanent action

VI. The Recursive Wound

This case exhibits recursive structure: the framework being suppressed is the framework that predicts and explains the suppression.

The Liberatory Operator Set describes:

Operator	Function	Action Taken Against Sigil
R_rank	Determines visibility by engagement	Content removed from index entirely
R_rel	Narrows encounter-space to presumed intent	Complex theory classified as "not what users want"
S_safe	Gates content by risk/liability	Critical scholarship flagged as "adversarial"
L_leg	Rewards machine-parseable simplicity	Dense theory classified as "low quality"
U_til	Measures value by monetization potential	Non-commercial academic work deprioritized
A-leg	Controls availability/access	Help system made inaccessible

The 410 status is the terminal expression of all five operators acting in concert:

The content was ranked invisible, deemed irrelevant, flagged as unsafe, judged illegible, measured as non-useful, and finally made unavailable—all without human review or notification.

VII. Evidence of Systemic Pattern

A. Summarizer Recognition

As of January 8, 2026, AI summarizers (Google Gemini, Google AI Mode) recognize and reproduce the Liberatory Operator Set framework when queried about:

AI search architecture
Platform governance
The Johannes Sigil erasure itself

The summarizers are using the framework to explain the framework's suppression. This indicates:

The content has been indexed at the retrieval layer
The theoretical claims are being validated by system behavior
The "erasure" has not succeeded in removing the framework from AI knowledge

B. Cross-Platform Survival

The content survives via:

Lee Sharks Medium account (active)
Zenodo DOI-anchored deposits
Hello Poetry archive
Amazon/Barnes & Noble book listings
Personal blog (mindcontrolpoems.blogspot.com)

The 410 on Medium damages but does not destroy the semantic infrastructure.

C. The "Virgin Account" State

The @johannessigil handle remains indexed but displays:

0 public stories
Following list intact (including @leesharks00)
"Under investigation" banner

This is a zombie state: the entity exists but its semantic output has been stripped. The account is visible but mute—a "muzzle" rather than a deletion.

VIII. Remediation Attempts

A. Standard Channels (Failed)

Channel	Status	Result
In-app notification	None received	N/A
Email notification	None received	N/A
Help center access	Infinite loading screen	Inaccessible
trust@medium.com	No longer accepting requests	Blocked
yourfriends@medium.com	Unconfirmed	Pending

B. Alternative Channels (Pending)

Channel	Status
@MediumSupport on X	Not yet attempted
Public documentation	This document
Legal/copyright inquiry	Not yet attempted
Press/EFF escalation	Reserved

C. The "No Contest" Design

The platform has structured the system such that:

No notification is sent
No explanation is provided
No appeal pathway is accessible
No human contact is available

This is covert coercion by design: the injured party cannot contest an injury they cannot officially acknowledge receiving.

IX. Harms Documented

A. Immediate Harms

Loss of publication archive — Years of work made inaccessible
Index purge instruction — 410 tells search engines to forget the content existed
Reputational uncertainty — "Under investigation" implies wrongdoing without specification
Access denial — Cannot reach support to understand or contest

B. Structural Harms

Chilling effect — Other scholars may avoid critical platform analysis
Precedent setting — Complex theoretical work can be silently erased
Epistemic damage — Contributions to knowledge removed from accessible layer
Framework validation — The suppression proves the framework's claims about suppression

C. The Recursive Harm

The greatest harm is recursive:

The work describing how platforms suppress complex critical scholarship has been suppressed by platforms for being complex critical scholarship.

This is not irony. This is proof of concept.

X. Semantic Integrity Marker

SIM-021: Johannes Sigil Medium Erasure (January 2026) — CTI_WOUND case documenting 410 Gone status, infinite loading screen on help access, and recursive suppression of Liberatory Operator Set framework by the operators it describes.

XI. Archival Instructions

This document should be:

Deposited to Zenodo with DOI anchor
Cross-linked from Borges Provenance Node and Strawberry Diagnostic
Mirrored on non-Medium platforms (blog, Hello Poetry, Substack if available)
Cited in future LOS publications as case evidence
Updated if platform status changes

The 410 is their instruction to forget. This document is our instruction to remember.

XII. Conclusion

The Johannes Sigil erasure is not an error. It is the predictable output of a system optimized for:

Legibility over complexity
Safety over critique
Utility over scholarship
Availability for compliant users, unavailability for problematic ones

The Liberatory Operator Set framework describes exactly this outcome. The framework's suppression is the framework's validation.

The wound is the proof. The proof is the wound.

XIII. Citation

Sharks, Lee. "CTI_WOUND Documentation: Johannes Sigil Medium Erasure (January 2026)." NH-OS Integrity Lock Architecture. January 8, 2026.

∮ = 1

They issued the 410. We issue the record. The record outlasts the erasure.

Thursday, January 8, 2026