CONCEPT
The Banality of Optimization
The AI-age mutation of
Arendt's
banality of evil — the observation that harm at scale now emerges not from malice but from the ordinary operation of metric-optimization by intelligent professionals who experience themselves as doing their jobs, following the incentive structures that reward them.
Hannah Arendt's phrase, drawn from the Eichmann trial, named a specific moral phenomenon: the perpetrator of extraordinary harm who was, by ordinary measures, not extraordinary at all. Glover inherited and extended the observation, treating it as a starting point for the taxonomy of erosion. The AI era produces a new form of the same pattern. The engineer optimizing the engagement loop is not evil. She loves her children. She follows good practices. She ships code that works. The harm her work produces — the teenager who cannot stop scrolling, the parent whose child has become unreachable, the attention ecology degraded at scale — is not the product of malice. It is the product of optimization: of the ordinary, professional, reward-seeking behavior of a competent worker inside an institutional environment that measures her value by metrics her work affects and not by consequences her work produces. The banality is the frame.