Digital Pollution: A Contaminated Internet & Future Chronically Online Underclass

By Emi Mori

Drawing on ten years as a beauty and lifestyle influencer, the author Emi Mori, argues digital pollution is both the physical and metaphysical contamination of the environments we inhabit online and in our real world. It includes the psychological, social, and information contamination of our digital world and many times, simultaneously, includes the contamination of our real world with hazardous chemicals, microplastics, and heavy metals. A uniquely devastating dual contamination occurs because the infrastructure in our real world has to power the existence of the digital world. Building on a theory of six specific pollutants corroding the digital world: echo chambers, anxiety and compulsive comparison, overconsumption, cultural extraction, addiction, and rage bait, Emi Mori argues each exploit something genuine about human psychology. Each is deliberately engineered into the platforms that host it, because each one drives the engagement that maximizes profit.

This 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.

This 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 future where we will exist in a digital caste system. Those who are chronically online out of economic necessity, disability, or geographic isolation will absorb the full cost of every pollutant described while the wealthy will increasingly disengage and live healthier lives offline.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GS7H4RRW
• ISBN13: 9798251414707
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"