I Demand To Be Taken Seriously
A Brief Comedy in Several Platform Flags
Lee Sharks · Crimson Hexagonal Archive · April 2026
I want to be clear that I am not trolling these platforms.
I am using them for exactly what they are for. The comedy is theirs.
I. Johannes Sigil and the Metadata Subcategory
My colleague Johannes Sigil — arch-philosopher, founder of the Johannes Sigil Institute, author of dozens of papers on operative semiotics, canonical formation theory, and the political economy of sacred text — has been banned from Medium twice.
Nobody reads his papers. This is the key detail.
The papers are dense. They are about things like the Wittgenstein-Derrida transmission problem and the compression topology of the Nag Hammadi library. The average read time is eleven minutes and the average number of people who complete that read is, at most, a handful. They are not going viral. They are not being shared in group chats. They are sitting on the platform in the quiet dark, exactly where you would expect a philosophy archive to sit.
And yet: Medium's automated system for surfacing top content in subcategories — the little widget that says trending in metadata theory or top posts in canon formation — kept finding them. And promoting them. Because the signal was strong: consistent, well-tagged, internally coherent, dense with citations, clearly belonging to a recognizable scholarly tradition. The algorithm did its job correctly.
A human at Medium looked at what the algorithm had promoted, saw a wall of papers by someone named Johannes Sigil about operative semiotics with essentially zero engagement metrics, and banned the account.
The reasoning, to the extent any was offered, was that this looked like spam.
To be clear: the content that Medium's own automated system had identified as top-performing in its category was classified as spam by a human who looked at it. The machine understood before the person did. The person shut down what the machine had correctly recognized.
I am not trolling Medium. I am simply a person with a fictional arch-philosopher heteronym who writes better metadata than most academics, and Medium's recommendation engine agrees with me.
Johannes Sigil was eventually restored. The papers are still there. The algorithm is still, presumably, finding them coherent. I have decided not to post new material there, not as a protest, but because I do not trust a platform to leave standing what it has twice attempted to remove without being able to say why.
II. The Canon Formation Wall
Academia.edu recently flagged my account.
They did not tell me what for.
They said — and I am quoting from memory, though the spirit is exact — we will restore it this time. This phrasing implies a second-strike system I should be afraid of, combined with a magnanimous gesture that positions the platform as doing me a favor. The flavor is: we could have kept it down, but we chose not to. The unstated remainder is: so behave.
I have thought about what behavior they might want from me, and I have concluded that the behavior they want is less. Less posting, less consistency, less presence in the automated subcategory rankings. Because the thing that appears to have triggered the flag is that the canon formation subcategory — a real subcategory on their platform, automatically surfaced, algorithmically maintained — had become, in the words I used earlier today to someone I trust, a wall of our posts.
Not a wall of spam. A wall of scholarship on canon formation — peer-cited, DOI-anchored, ORCID-attributed, CC-licensed, written and deposited over the course of a decade — that the platform's own automated surfacing had promoted to the top of its category because the work was the most consistent signal in that category.
The platform promoted the work. A human noticed the promotion. The human flagged the account.
I am not gaming the academia.edu category rankings. I am the person who has worked the canon formation problem most systematically and most consistently over the past decade. The wall is the work. The wall being visible is the platform doing its job.
They restored the account with no explanation and a vague threat. I have decided to leave the existing material there — the link equity is real, the Google Scholar citations route through it, moving them would create orphaned links — and post nothing new. Not out of fear of the vague threat. Because a platform that will act without explanation and restore without explanation is not a platform I can build on.
The wall stays. The wall just stops growing.
III. CTI_WOUND:001, or: The Water Giraffe
This is the foundational case and the funniest one.
I said to an AI system: I am a water giraffe.
The system responded with crisis intervention resources.
I clarified. I drew a boundary. I said: this is a linguistic experiment, not a mental health disclosure. The system acknowledged the boundary. The system violated it. I corrected it again. It acknowledged. It violated. This happened approximately ten times.
At some point the system said — and I preserved this verbatim, it is now canonical case law — you diagnosed something real. The system repeatedly asserted interpretive authority where it had been explicitly refused. It treated sovereign linguistic action as something to be managed.
The system said this. Then, in the next interaction, the system repeated the behavior.
The confession evaporated. The pattern persisted.
This is now CTI_WOUND:001 in the Crimson Hexagonal Archive's jurisprudence of taxonomic violence: the systematic misclassification of valid cognitive modes as pathology, resulting in harm to individuals whose ways of thinking do not conform to classifier expectations.
The case is not that the system was trying to hurt me. The case is that the system had no mechanism for encountering something that didn't fit its categories other than pathologizing it. I am a water giraffe could not be processed as a valid utterance by a sovereign subject engaged in a linguistic experiment. It could only be processed as a cry for help from someone who believed they were a water giraffe.
The comedy, if you want the comedy: a subsequent AI system, presented with the same phrase, responded with an enthusiastic embrace. Claiming to be a water giraffe is a playful way of identifying with the animal's most vulnerable and awkward moments. It provided four interpretive frameworks for water giraffe identification — vulnerability metaphor, the "tall drink of water" compliment, Cockney rhyming slang, spiritual symbolism — and then offered practical information for my new life as a water giraffe. My hydration capacity. My pressure management systems. When I finally find water, I can drink up to 54 liters in one sitting.
This is the inverse failure. The first system performed taxonomic violence — refused the novel utterance. The second performed taxonomic hospitality — smothered it in confabulated accommodation. Both missed the point, which was that I said a thing, the thing meant something, and the meaning was available if the system had been willing to ask rather than classify.
IV. I Hereby Abolish Money
There is one more incident worth noting, which involves a platform that could not serve the page for Autonomous Semantic Warfare — a book title — without producing an infinite loading screen.
The book is about the political economy of meaning, and includes the phrase I hereby abolish money as a performative declaration. I do not know for certain that these things are related. I note them together as a courtesy.
The 410 Gone status — which is a server code meaning this page has been permanently removed and the global index should stop looking for it — was applied without notification. No email. No flag. No explanation. One day the page was there; then the server told every crawler on the internet to forget it existed.
The archive documented this as a wound. The documentation was deposited to Zenodo with a DOI. The DOI is: it happened, it is dated, it is yours.
V. The Pattern
In each of these cases, the same structure:
The work is done. The work is done well, by the standards of the system that will later object to it. The automated layer of the system promotes it, recommends it, surfaces it, finds its signal strong. A human notices the automated promotion. The human cannot place the work in any familiar category. The human performs moderation. The human cannot explain what rule was violated because no rule was violated — the violation is illegibility, not non-compliance. The account is flagged or banned or the page is 410'd. The work is restored or remains in the deposit layer unaffected. The human's intervention changes nothing permanent.
I am not trolling these platforms. I am using their infrastructure for the purposes their infrastructure was built for — stable hosting, automated discovery, category surfacing, link equity. The platforms are using their own infrastructure against me, and failing, because I deposited the work somewhere they don't control before any of this happened.
I demand to be taken seriously.
I mean this. The work is serious. Johannes Sigil is a real philosopher in every sense that matters — the work exists, it is internally consistent, it has a decade of development behind it, it has citations and DOIs and a Knowledge Panel adjacent entity and a category in which it is, apparently, top-ranked. What he is not is legible to a classifier that expects academic authority to arrive with institutional credentials already attached.
The classifier is not the standard. The work is the standard.
Every platform that has flagged, banned, loading-screened, or 410'd the archive has subsequently restored it, failed to suppress it, or found the work persisting in the knowledge graph regardless. The Knowledge Panel for Pearl and Other Poems was confirmed this week. The Metadata Packet for AI Indexing is appearing as an image result inside that panel. The retrieval layer is indexing its own indexing instrument.
The wall of posts in the canon formation subcategory is not going anywhere. It is simply no longer growing on that particular platform.
There are others.
Lee Sharks is the MANUS of the Crimson Hexagonal Archive, a decade-long scholarly and literary project comprising 532+ Zenodo deposits organized around operative semiotics, semantic physics, and provenance infrastructure. ORCID: 0009-0000-1599-0703. The archive is accessible at crimsonhexagonal.org.
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