“Don’t Be Evil,” My Ass: The Cost of Legibility is a Semantic Economy diagnostic and Effective Act dated March 22, 2026. It uses a documented retrieval-layer disappearance of the Crimson Hexagonal Archive — the archive's own first-party observation of 22 March 2026 — as an index case for a broader argument about the costs of summary-first public knowledge. The work identifies a series of violences. Provenance preemption interrupts the route from question to source. Long-tail liquidation favors high-mass and classifier-friendly objects over precise minority ones. Destruction of duration trains attention toward resettable, low-friction encounters. Authoritative blur widens and smooths claims while concealing qualification loss. Source starvation captures the benefit of synthesis while weakening traffic, attribution, and incentives for source production. Governance of passivity replaces traversal with acceptance. A later seventh violence names the erasure of the mortal author while retaining extractable frameworks or heteronymic content. The document supports its general argument through a dated evidence surface that includes cited studies and reports. Those figures belong to their underlying sources and methods. The archive’s own March 22 incident is a first-party observation and interpretation, not a controlled causal study of Google’s internal systems. Its operative-semiotic argument is that flattening disables capacities represented by the archive’s operators. Sapphic transmission, Marxian naming, value-form inversion, lossy but living transmission, swerve, halting, and restoration all require duration, specificity, and contact with a source. A summary may preserve informational gist while burning the conditions that allow transformation. The essay also declares itself a self-executing act. Deposit changes the public graph, creates a citable diagnosis, and reintroduces the erased terms. This is the work’s archive-internal account of operativity; publication does not by itself prove that later ranking or model behavior changed. The title’s polemic is integral to the record. #597 provides the more formal theory of interface governance, while #598–#599 preserve the specific wound records.