Abstract
Arendt's “banality of evil” illuminates how large-scale harm can emerge not from exceptional malice but from thoughtless obedience to bureaucratic systems and uncritical conformity to institutional authority. Applied to global institutional contexts, the concept has proven analytically generative: uncritical commitment to the Washington Consensus translated into structural adjustment programs that were well-intentioned yet produced structurally violent outcomes, including entrenched austerity, socioeconomic inequality, and fragmented health systems, contributing to large-scale suffering and avoidable deaths worldwide. This paper argues that the World Bank Group's dominant technosolutionist approach to global digital transformation (GDT) is producing analogous dynamics, which it theorizes as the “banality of global algorithmic governance.”
GDT refers to the globally coordinated propagation, harmonization, and implementation of digital and AI technologies, infrastructures, data architectures, policies, governance arrangements across all scales restructuring interactions, systems, institutions, ecosystems, value flows, societies and life. Global algorithmic governance refers to the deepening algorithmic intermediation of state, market, and societal relations through the combined deployment of surveillant technologies, massive data flows, AI/ML/GenAI-equipped digital platforms, and hyperscale cloud infrastructure. Predatory global algorithmic governance refers to the extractive, exploitative, expropriative, and dehumanizing political-economic dynamics extended through global algorithmic governance into countries, societies, and everyday life, the structurally, infrastructurally, and directly violent consequences of which this paper theorizes as global algorithmic violence.
The World Bank Group formally institutionalized its holistic GDT approach through its new Digital Transformation (renamed Digital and AI) Vice Presidential Unit (VPU) in 2024, operationalizing across three interconnected initiatives: Global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) program, Maximizing Finance for Development (MFD) agenda, and GovTech. The Group's technosolutionist GDT approach frames universal digitalization and AI adoption as apolitical and inherently progressive accelerants of sustainable development that’s benefits are broadly distributed, and harmful effects extraneous or technical challenges rather than as the structural consequences of the approach itself. In neglecting the global political-economic and power asymmetrical effects it produces, the Group’s technosolutionist GDT approach cannot adequately address the global structural root causes of the very inequities it purports to solve.
Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, official documents, policy reports, news, and 52 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted between 2023 and 2025 with global policy leaders, government officials, practitioners, corporate actors, human rights law experts, technologists, and researchers, the paper’s case study traces the World Bank Group's GDT approach through its interconnected initiatives to its cultivation of predatory global algorithmic governance— entrenching digital dependency, extractive data flows, financialization, and predatory dynamics that deepen austerity, precarity, and inequity—materially harmful effects for human rights, health, and wellbeing. Through a social medicine lens, the case traces the World Bank Group's technosolutionist GDT approach’s multi-scalar and downstream violent consequences in the Kenyan context.
The paper's central argument is that the World Bank Group's technosolutionist GDT approach is neither natural, neutral, nor inevitable; rather, it’s a choice. A global institution's choice to advance the banality of global algorithmic governance through its GDT efforts replication (neo)colonial dynamics (platformization), hyperscaling of digital extractivism (data assetiziation), deepening of the structural root causes of inequity (financialization), and acceleration of predatory global algorithmic governance (algorithmic necropolitics), constitutes a choice to perpetuate global algorithmic violence. Insulating the World Bank Group from moral accountability for the foreseeable and preventable downstream violences being extended through its globally coordinated efforts naturalizes GDT injustice and entrenches a global political-economic status quo that undermines the very global public interest objectives it publicly purports to serve.
As one of the most prominent institutions within the emergent GDT governance ecosystem, the World Bank Group is among the best positioned to reorient the dominant institutional GDT approach away from predation and banality. Its reluctance to do so is a deeply political and ideological choice to prioritize profits over people, conflate economic growth with economic justice ignoring predation, and perpetuate global algorithmic violence. However, just as the World Bank Group has shown to the world in the past, it can choose to make different choices more prioritizing of the global common good where it only decides to critically engage. Finally, the banality of global algorithmic governance reveals (1) how monstrosity can emerge from the mundanity of an uncritical technosolutionist GDT approach; (2) why global institutions' play such a distinct role in transnationally shaping digital transformation globally and locally through global structures; and (3) why global institutions' have both the agency and moral responsibility for taking affirmative steps to diminish predatory global algorithmic governance and prevent global algorithmic violence throughout its GDT efforts.
Initiatives for accelerating public sector global digitalization and algorithmization using a whole-of-government approach (e.g., Kenya’s “Building Resilient and Responsive Health Systems” World Bank project (P179698).