The Labor of Being Legible: Fighting for Visibility in an AI World

There is a strange new weight settling on our backs. Not the weight of work itself, but the weight of being seen as someone who deserves to work in the first place. Everywhere you look, visibility has turned into a job. You line up at digital gates, clicking boxes to prove you are not a bot. You submit resumes into automated tunnels, hoping a keyword hits the right sensor. You market yourself constantly because platforms reward whoever yells loudest, not who builds the deepest value. And if you are caring for a child, holding a grieving friend, tending a community, making art that nourishes people in ways no metric can capture, the system shrugs and does not count you at all. The machine will not recognize you unless you translate yourself into its narrow vocabulary. So you learn to reshape, resize, repackage. And no one pays you for the effort. The Quiet Work AI Pretends Not To See We know what holds families, neighborhoods, and entire economies together. Care. Creativity. Emotional steadiness. Skilled intuition. Slow attention. Honorable intent. The sort of labor that keeps humanity from fraying. Yet these are the first things ignored by automated scoring systems and algorithmic filters. Women and people of color, already carrying centuries of under-recognized labor, are once again told their work is “extra” unless they can frame it in the language of output dashboards. That is not a coincidence. It is inheritance. Invisible work is easy to extract when you pretend it isn’t work. Proving You Are Human Should Not Be a Job There is something almost absurd about clicking on tiny pictures of traffic lights and crosswalks just to pass through the digital gates of daily life. But there is something darker, too. Every time we have to prove we are human, we are accepting a world built on distrust. A world where the burden of proof lives with the person, not the system. And for many, those tests are not trivial. They are barriers. The tools assume a body that sees a…