Digital Pollution

Digital Pollution argues that social media is not merely a tool but an environment, one that, like any environment, can be contaminated. Drawing on ten years as a beauty and lifestyle influencer, the author Emi Mori, builds on a theory of six specific pollutants corroding the digital world: echo chambers, anxiety and compulsive comparison, overconsumption, cultural extraction, addiction, and rage bait. Each exploit something genuine about human psychology. Each is deliberately engineered into the platforms that host it, because each one drives the engagement that sells advertising.

The book traces the human cost of this system through the author's own experience including a stalker who used her content to locate her home address, an AI-generated video using her likeness in scam advertisements, and through her brother's gambling addiction, which developed through streaming platforms Kick.com and Twitch during the pandemic. It also examines how generative AI has accelerated every existing harm and introduced new ones: stolen likenesses, synthetic creative work, and deepfake romance scams targeting the lonely.

The book's most urgent argument is structural: the ability to disengage from the polluted digital environment is fast becoming a class privilege. Research on short-form video and cognitive decline, combined with documented evidence that technology executives shield their own children from the products they build for everyone else, points toward a digital caste system. Those who are chronically online out of economic necessity or geographic isolation will absorb the full cost of every pollutant described while the wealthy will increasingly disengage and live healthier offline off social media.