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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • icon picker
            Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
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Chapter 8. Digital pollution
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Chapter 8. Digital pollution

The collateral damage to society
Digital pollution is the collateral damage to society from unregulated tech growth, just as environmental pollution is the damage from unregulated industrial growth.
We may be tempted to think that just a few tech giants create digital pollution. In reality, unintended consequences and digital pollution are pervasive.
Digital pollution frays the fabric of society in five major ways:
Fueling inequality
Hijacking attention
Creating ideological polarization
Eroding privacy
Eroding the information ecosystem
Accepting that our products might be causing digital pollution is often difficult because the underlying product decisions are not deliberately malicious.
In an iteration-led approach we test features in the market to see what customers respond to, and we iterate. But to assess what customers like, we look at financial metrics, typically revenues or time spent on-site. As a result, an iteration-led approach often optimizes for financial metrics without consideration for user or societal well-being.
In building our products while pursuing profits, we can no longer ignore how we impact society.
Companies that optimize for profits without a clear purpose create digital pollution. In contrast, organizations with a clear purpose that disregard profits are operating as charities. Charities are important but can’t carry the entire burden of creating a better world—the business world touches billions more lives than charities. For sustainable growth, society needs more businesses to pursue profits while being vision-driven.
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