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• Local government: Council housing allocation systems rely on binary flags, overlooking complex household arrangements and informal support networks.

• Media: Newsroom analytics prioritise high-engagement stories, reducing investigative coverage of long-term local issues.
  
  

Practical markers of this silence are measurable and mundane: shorter meetings, longer dashboards, fewer narrative case notes, and a rising share of decisions recorded as “system recommendation accepted.” The silence is not an absence of speech, but the narrowing of what counts as worthy of attention.

Repair begins by restoring space and obligation for human sense-making. Requiring short narrative inputs before automated recommendations are executed. Mandates named human sign-off for high-impact decisions. Building routine ethnographic audits that surface lived harms beyond metrics. Creating protected time for teams to interrogate recommendations and overturn automated defaults. Making provenance visible: requiring dashboards to show data sources, model assumptions and decision chains.

These are not technical band-aids, they are institutional habits recalibrated to preserve civic judgement.

Date: 14 October 2025
Location: Jobcentre Plus office, West Midlands Actors: Work Coach (WC), Automated System (AS), Claimant (C) Mode: Transcript; witness summary

Summary AS flags C as non-compliant due to an apparent missed appointment. WC follows the default recommendation and schedules a sanction. C explains they missed the appointment while attending their child’s emergency dental appointment. No narrative field was captured by AS, and WC lacked authority to authorise an override without manager sign-off.

Interpretation Automation substituted for judgement. The absence of narrative input and constrained human discretion produced a harmful outcome that the metrics did not capture.

Healthcare - Triage algorithms and atypical presentations
Summary vignette
A 62-year-old woman phones NHS 111 with intermittent breathlessness and dizziness. The symptom codes entered by the call advisor match a low-priority pathway, so the algorithm schedules a same-day telephone assessment rather than an urgent face-to-face review. Over the next 48 hours, her condition deteriorates. When she attends A&E, she is found to have an under-recognised cardiac arrhythmia.