(2022-12-08) Your Platform Is Not An Ecosystem

Maria Farrell: Your platform is not an ecosystem. Another day, another exhortation to join an “ecosystem” that’s anything but. I could pick a hundred examples, but one that recently caught my eye was an ad placed in the Financial Times by the Singapore stock exchange, SGX Group, promising “multiple growth avenues, one trusted ecosystem”. SGX wants companies to list on its exchange rather than, say, the Hong Kong

Ecosystems can be a lot of things. ‘Trusted’, by which they mean centrally policed to achieve defined, lower-risk outcomes, is not one of them

Calling built environments ‘ecosystems’ is common everywhere

But it’s most often used in the tech world to describe the relations between software, services and hardware typically owned by a single company. For example, it’s how Google describes everything that hangs off the Android operating system.

a reminder of what an ecosystem actually is.

An ecosystem is a set of unbidden organisms and the physical environment with and in which they interact. It’s constantly evolving, and the real interest, value and drive for change all come from the emergent properties of the relations between its many parts

An ecosystem is not the plaything of a pampered princeling, like Meta, but a set of living, striving things, both competitive and cooperative, and the place they live.

As a PR strategy, the misused metaphor is a sleight of hand. But it’s more than that.

They need constant acceleration, but only along rigidly determined axes. They invoke a sense of limitlessness while herding people – ‘users’ – into feeding lots. They want to be the whole world, the ultimate everything app, but also to edit out unprofitable activities and externalise their own negative consequences. They say ecosystem. They mean snow-globe. It’s not at all clear if they understand these are different kinds of thing.

Calling your company’s assets an ecosystem in this slyly limited way is a trick to divert attention and responsibility

We don’t just serve the interests of system-owners when we repeat the pretty lie. We shut down an essential way to imagine alternatives. So what if, every time we read ‘ecosystem’, we instead say ‘plantation’? (sharecropper)

Google’s interlinked extractive systems are plantations whose single crop is data for ads.

The second response to how the term ecosystem is used by its enemies to describe its opposite is to see what else the metaphor might reveal

expresses something many of us deeply desire but can barely articulate

There are three key ways in which our current tech “ecosystems” differ from real ones.

Diversity

the Internet in the US now has two, maybe three wildly dominant content distribution networks, and just a couple of DNS providers

But the antithesis of biological abundance isn’t just biological paucity. It’s the excess growth of one thing at the expense of all others

Social media literally maddens people

Value

In a real ecosystem, value is generated by the relationships between different parts of the system

as Robin Berjon has put it, “in an ecosystem everything is infrastructure for everything else.”

So much of human life and worth is missing from the stripped down and hyped up way we currently internet.

Control

In the most trivially obvious way, tech platforms are designed systems of hierarchical control, while ecosystems are sets of complex, emergent, multi-valent interaction where each organism is held in check by the others and their overall environment.