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CHAPTER 1
Digital Pollution
When you read the word âpollution,â what comes to mind?
Wildlife slicked as millions of gallons of oil spill into the gulf? Skies shrouded in dense haze from billowing smokestacks? Illegal dumping of hazardous waste that leaches into the soil and groundwater? Perhaps nuclear meltdowns like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima. Maybe toxic rivers like the Mississippi, the Ganges, or the Yellow.1 Or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now more than twice the size of Texas and nearly three times the size of France.2
Our minds tend toward the egregious and dramatic examplesâand rightfully so. Every year, pollution kills millions of people and other living things and harms tens of millions more. But its causes and consequences are often much more subtle.
When you read the words âdigital pollution,â does anything come to mind?
Think about the family member who spent several months, several thousand dollars, and several sleepless nights recovering from identity theft. Or your reaction to a bank alert about a potentially fraudulent charge. Think about the feeling you get when you return to your inbox after a week away. Envision the 2.4 billion emails being sent every single second.3 Imagine how many of those emails are sent by machines rather than people. Realize that half of it is pure spam.4 Thatâs on top of the 4.5 billion spam text messages sent every year.5
Have you ever had a friend post on social media about her account being hacked? Definitely. And it comes with the caution not to accept the new connection request from a fake account using her name and photo. Have you ever received an alert that your personal information has been compromised in a data breach? Certainly. But youâre desensitized to it at this point. Phishing attacks. Robocalls. Suspicious links and attachments. Questionable messages from unfamiliar people. These all seem endless and ever present. Theyâre all around you.
Like environmental pollution, digital pollutionâs harms are real even when subtle. Theyâre felt by each of us. Theyâre experienced by the groups, communities, and companies of which weâre members. This pollution costs us time and money. For example, the cybersecurity industry is projected to grow to a $173 billion industry by 2026, up more than 50% from 2020.6
But digital pollution also threatens the immeasurable and the priceless. Trust and relationships. Bonding and connection.
Because online content is faster and cheaper to produce and distribute than physical content, digital demands on your attention are massive and growing. The volume of noise alone threatens our productivity as we sift through it all. And it inhibits our ability to effectively reach people as they sort through their feeds and inboxes. Fold in selfish, greedy, and malicious activity, as well as exponentially more and increasingly valuable data, and it gets toxic quickly.
The assessments we have to make every time we enter a virtual environment arenât just âDoes this matter?â or âIs this high priority?â but also âIs this safe or unsafe?â and âIs this real or fake?â Because weâve moved online faster than we have evolved and adapted, humans arenât well-equipped for this. The automatic and subconscious assessments we make all day long in the physical world donât occur to us as often or serve us as well online. As we share our digital personas, others hide behind digital facades. Our vulnerability opens us to exploitation.
You and everyone you know is a stakeholder in our shared virtual environments of apps, platforms, networks, channels, and mediums. Every time you turn on or pick up a connected device (which is probably more often than you think), digital pollution affects you and your business. It affects employees and customers. It eats up time and expense. It threatens trust and relationships.
As with pollution of our air, water, and soil, you pay the costs of digital pollution whether youâre a polluter or notâand whether youâre a direct target or not. When we poison our physical environment, we poison ourselvesâthe air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Because we live, work, and play in polluted virtual spaces, we must observe and understand these digital forms of pollution, too. They poison us.
Weâll begin by comparing and contrasting pollution, which we are familiar with, to digital pollution, which hasnât been explored nearly as much. The causes, characteristics, costs, and consequences of digital pollution must become clearer. Our human thriving and success depend on it.
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF POLLUTION
No one intends to create environmental pollution. Itâs a consequence. What pollutes our air, water, and soil is waste from a process with a separate goal. The goal of that process is value creation or value deliveryânot waste, inefficiency, or pollution. So, while itâs easy and rightful to demonize egregious polluters, we must also acknowledge pollutionâs correlation with rising living standards, increasing product and service availability, and wide-ranging benefits we enjoy every day.
Tradeoffs
We hate oil spills, but we love contact lenses, golf balls, cosmetics, N-95 masks, and thousands of other daily use, oil-based products.7 We hate toxic mine waste, but we love our smartphones, which require ore minerals for their displays, electronics, circuitry, and batteries.8 Our food, clothing, footwear, home furnishings, jewelry, electronics, household cleaners, travel, and other material wants and needs all create varying amounts of pollution.
Harmful but useful, energy production is one of the greatest sources of pollution. Weâre slowly mitigating some of its negative effects through energy-efficient production, energy-efficient products, cleaner-burning fuels, renewable energy sources, and energy conservation. But weâre not solving the problem by removing furnaces from homes in Toronto or removing air conditioners from homes in Phoenix any more than weâre solving the digital pollution problem by removing internet connectivity from our homes and offices. We make tradeoffs.
While we manage pollution through these compromises, we must guard ourselves against ignorance or complacency toward the status quo. False dichotomies, erroneous assumptions, outdated ideas, and broken models should not be accepted.
History
Because human-caused pollution is the dark side of so many lights, itâs been with us for a long time. As early as the 1st century BC, Lucretius pointed out âthe ill effects in the minersâ complexionsâ and wrote, âHow deadly are the exhalations of the gold mines!â In the same century, Vitruvius wrote that spring water coming from mining areas was harmful. Later, in the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder noted how mine emissions affected animals.9 Hundreds of years later, in 1306, Edward I of England issued a prohibition on coal burning in London. Court cases on groundwater contamination in Europe occurred as early as 1349.10
Sources
All along, pollution could be characterized by its source and its recipientâthe mines and the mine workers in the observations of Lucretius. Sources are where the pollution comes from, where itâs released. They include transportation, factories, agriculture, and household activities. Recipients are where the pollution ends up, what gets contaminated. They include people, animals, plants, air, water, and soil.11
When we can easily identify pollutionâs source, itâs a point source. For example, an acute fish kill immediately downstream from a factoryâs effluent pipe. However, pollution also comes from nonpoint sourcesâdiffuse, dispersed, generally prevalent, and harder to trace. For example, oil, grease, and chemicals constantly running off of parking lots and roads into our waterways. Or microplastics found at the greatest depths of the ocean, in Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, in our food supply, in our blood and our organs, and even in unborn babies.12,13,14,15
Costs
The costs of pollution range from the obvious to the obscured. Much pollution is a cost externalized by a business or organization onto the public. Itâs systemic waste that would be eliminated if not for the cost of doing so. Thatâs to say, designing and implementing a highly efficient process could reduce harmful outputs. But rather than paying for these improvements, a company may simply release pollution into the environment.
Because it reduces production costs, pollution may seem to lower the retail price of products and services. But the full costs must always be paid. As stakeholders in this shared physical environment, you and I pay physically, emotionally, and financially.
We pay directly through taxes that support legislation, monitoring, litigation, and cleanup. We pay indirectly through our health, wellbeing, and healthcare spending. The most common causes of human deaths, like cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and respiratory diseases, are all exacerbated by environmental pollutants. A report by the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health found that pollution caused 9 million premature deaths in 2015â16% of all global death. That year, pollution also cost us $4.6 trillionâ6.2% of global economic output.16
One positive trend: Increasing transparency and accountability are putting some of the costs back onto polluters. Reputational damage and lost revenue are forcing some companies to clean up their acts. The same is true for digital polluters.
Regulation
Laws and regulations are in place to reduce pollution, but poor implementation and weak enforcement continue to be a problem around the globe.17 Legislation tends to be reactive and one step behind. Enforcement tends to be understaffed and underfunded relative to the size of the problem. And even when found negligent, a polluter may face an insufficiently prohibitive punishment. For aggressive polluters, externalizing costs may be a conscious, rational decision; fines and legal fees may just be line items on the budget.
To the degree regulation is effective, the cost of compliance is a worthwhile investment. A study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found the total costs of the Clean Air Act from 1970 to 1990 to be just over $500 billion. The middle-range estimate of the value of its benefits in that time was $22 trillionâ nearly a 44x return on investment.18
Priceless Capital
Some of pollutionâs harms are irreparable; it can destroy the finite and priceless. Namely, natural capital, which includes the entirety of the worldâs natural resources like clean air, clean water, fertile soil, biodiversity, and healthy, balanced ecosystems. Natural capital doesnât show up on balance sheets or financial reports. To the degree itâs immeasurable, itâs neither visible nor valuable in a formal accounting.
This priceless capital is critical to human thriving and to human existence.
Some degradation can be restored, like replanting trees after a deforestation event. At a certain point, however, deforestation can become desertification, which is far more costly and difficult to restoreâif it can be restored at all. Other consequences without remedy include the depletion of non-renewable resources, the extinction of species, and the introduction of tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals never tested for safety.19
Subjectivity...
