[marginalium]
Platforms are not ecosystems
28 Mar 2023
Platforms are not ecosystems:
tech platforms and proprietary software environments are not ecosystems, so don’t call them that. Call them built environments, i.e. designed, rules-based systems that explicitly structure interests to secure specific intended outcomes. It does no good – for journalists in particular – to transmit the suggestion that a walled garden is the same as a living forest. That an app market-place is the same kind of thing as an open protocol. 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’? A plantation is a hierarchical, exploitative monoculture … Google’s interlinked extractive systems are plantations whose single crop is data for ads. They’re designed environments; their parent company, Alphabet, a conurbation of control.
Anthologies: Betterment, Digital Architecture, On Aesthetics, On the Nature of Things, On Thinking and Reasoning, Everything Is Ideology, Allodial Network