I Demand To Be Taken Seriously is a comic essay by Lee Sharks about platform moderation, classifier error, and the difference between deposited work and platform permission.
The essay recounts several episodes. Papers attributed to Johannes Sigil are said to have been algorithmically surfaced and then treated as spam; an Academia.edu account is described as flagged and restored without a clear rule explanation; an AI system repeatedly interprets “I am a water giraffe” as pathology despite explicit correction; another system responds with elaborate, confabulated hospitality; and a page associated with Autonomous Semantic Warfare is reported as receiving a 410 response.
Across these cases, Sharks argues that illegibility rather than ordinary rule violation triggers intervention. The platform’s discovery layer recognizes a coherent category signal, while moderation cannot place the work within familiar institutional expectations. DOI deposits and archive copies then preserve a record that the platform does not control.
The piece uses comedy, exaggeration, and deadpan institutional language. Its event chronology and causal interpretations are the author’s documented account. It should not be treated as a neutral audit of Medium, Academia.edu, Google, or any AI provider without independent evidence.