Administrative Compassion

Administrative Compassion examines systems that describe rationing as care.

The note follows a family of fictional public services in which waiting lists, eligibility thresholds and automated triage are redesigned around the language of personalisation. Citizens receive warmer messages, clearer interfaces and more accurate predictions while their access to human attention becomes increasingly conditional.

The argument is deliberately uncomfortable: an institution may become more compassionate at the level of language while becoming less capable of compassion as a practice. The research note asks what happens when empathy is treated as a property of an interface rather than a discretionary human response.