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Digital ecosystem: The journey of a metaphor

Maroš Krivý

PII: S2666-3783(23)00009-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2023.100057
Reference: DIGGEO 100057

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Received date: 20 October 2021

Revised date: 10 January 2023
Accepted date: 20 April 2023

Please cite this article as: M. Krivý, Digital ecosystem: The journey of a metaphor, (2023),
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Digital ecosystem: The journey of a metaphor

Maroš Krivý

Department of Urban Studies, Faculty of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts, Põhja

puiestee 7, 10412 Tallinn, Estonia

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maros.krivy@artun.ee
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resubmitted to

Digital Geography and Society

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as part of the special issue “Digital Nature”

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January 2023
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Abstract

The term “digital ecosystem” has become ubiquitous through a seemingly endless

stream of scholarship, punditry and hyperbole around digitalization, to the point

that the metaphor is becoming dead. Considering “ecosystem” as a traveling

concept straddling natural, social and technical systems, this article traces the

extension of “digital ecosystem,” along with the adjacent “business ecosystem”

and “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” in the fields of computer science, economy,

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governance and environmental policy. The origins of the concept as a form of

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circuitry applied to nature are outlined as a background against which to trace its
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role as a socio-technical metaphor for digital capitalism. Since the 1990s, various
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formulations of “ecosystem” have offered a naturalistic interpretation to

phenomena ranging from economic interactions to digital infrastructure and the

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urban everyday. I conclude that by representing the internet and the market as
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complex, self-organizing processes, the metaphor prioritizes the imperative of

adapting to—and downplays the possibility of challenging—our erratic digital

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capitalism. The article contributes by illuminating the ideological work of

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naturalistic models in the digital political economy. Evidence on using digital

ecosystems in environmental policy is still emerging but points to a form of

legitimacy exchange that reduces environmental problems to technical issues.

Keywords

nature, ecosystem, digital capitalism, platform capitalism, metaphor, imaginaries

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Introduction

The term “digital ecosystem” has become commonplace to the point of ubiquity so that

“ecosystem” is now a dead metaphor serving as a focal point for a seemingly endless stream

of scholarship, punditry and hyperbole around digitalization. This article surveys the

extension over the past decades of the term, along with the adjacent “business ecosystem” and

“entrepreneurial ecosystem,” in computer science, economy, environmental policy and related

fields. Its main goal is to examine the ideological work that these metaphors do when they

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shape debates, imaginaries and policies around the digital future. The premise is that a study

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of digital nature is not limited to the impact of digital technologies on the biophysical

environment but encompasses the significance of naturalism and nature-based metaphors in

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political economy.
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There is now a rapidly expanding critical scholarship around platform capitalism and the

power of Big Tech (Srnicek 2016; Chun 2016; Zuboff 2019), and the concept of an ecosystem
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has been traced to the capacity of digital platforms to intermediate and reconvene existing
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relationships in the contemporary city (Barns 2020). Yet the widespread adoption in the

public and private sectors, as well as among pundits and scholars, of ecosystem as a
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naturalistic imaginary of digital capitalism remains understudied. This is in contrast to other

digital imaginaries such as platform or cloud (Gillespie 2010; Hu 2015). The ecological

provenance of the term, along with how it determines where boundaries are drawn, who or

what is included and the nature of their relationships, has been mentioned in passing (Luque-

Ayala and Marvin 2020: 36–40), but a more thorough investigation is needed of the

ideological underpinnings and work of digital ecosystem as a political economic/ecological

metaphor.
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This article draws on science and technology scholarship and other studies of metaphors to

show how knowledge is transposed from one domain of activity to another (Haraway 1978;

Taylor 1988, 2005; Taylor and Blum 1991; Harrington 1996; Hayles 1999; Gandy 2006;

Jasanoff and Kim 2015; Sheehan and Wahrman 2015; Helmreich 2020). Why study

metaphors? They orientate scientific knowledge, design and policy, give rise to technical

models, mediate expertise, and otherwise influence material practices affecting the social and

natural environments (Mirowski 1994; Ong 2005; Gandy 2002, 2005; Light 2009; Halpern

2013; Mattern 2021). Metaphors matter because they enable certain perspectives and exclude

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others, thereby shaping political economies and ecologies across different scales. They need

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scrutiny as a medium of what communication scholars Geoffrey Bowker (1993) and Fred
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Turner (2006) call “legitimacy exchange,” when experts in two different areas draw on their
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respective authority to justify their activities.
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The article does not argue that metaphors always mystify: from Karl Marx’s metabolic rift
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(Wark 2015; Gandy 2018) to Nick Dyer-Witheford’s (2015) digital vortex, nature-based

metaphors have evidently helped advance critical approaches to capitalism. I can also see how
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“digital ecosystem” could well be appropriated towards socio-environmental justice, digital

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commons and alternative social programs.1 However, the article focuses on the metaphor’s

history and present use in the context of digital capitalism to examine what it enables,

marginalizes and ignores. A key opportunity for the materialist analysis of language,

according to cultural theorist McKenzie Wark is to “trace metaphor back to the process of its

production” (2015: 125).

It will be shown that the journey of “digital ecosystem” is marked by a series of

transmutations between the natural and technical contexts. Entrepreneurs, policy makers and
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technical experts have drawn on the interpretative models and authority of ecology to

represent digital networks as self-regulating and exhibiting other processes found in complex

natural systems. Reflecting the individual and institutional positionalities of its advocates,

“digital ecosystem” has provided a series of naturalistic interpretations to phenomena ranging

from the changing roles of economic competition and collaboration, to the seemingly

autonomous behavior of computer networks, and the opportunities and challenges of digital

technology for individuals, firms and regulators. Yet ecologists themselves have originally

theorized ecosystem by borrowings from electrical engineering, cybernetics and other

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technical fields, while at the other end of the historical spectrum, the very category of a digital

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ecosystem has been picked up in mainstream environmental initiatives with the hope that it
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will help achieve sustainability and resilience goals. A particular interest, seen against the
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larger history of systems thinking and other attempts to naturalize capitalist modernity, is in

the role “neo-naturalistic” representations of dynamic, self-generating and complex nature (as
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opposed to those emphasizing the immutability of the natural order) play in legitimizing
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digital capitalism (Alexander 2014; Mirowski 1994; Halpern 2013; Sheehan and Wahrman

2015; Siskin 2016).

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The evidence is drawn from key research monographs, policy papers and corporate

presentations in which “digital ecosystem” and adjacent terms have been introduced and

theorized. Rather than providing a comprehensive history, the case studies focus on

entrepreneurship, technical expertise and other fields at the forefront of digital capitalism, to

examine the ways in which ecosystems have been socially constructed in a “non-ecological”

domain. This main body of the text is bookended by a pair of sections addressing assumptions

about, and material implications for, the biophysical environment. In what follows, I first

outline a history of the ecosystem concept in ecology with a focus on its technical pedigree.
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The article then turns to business management and computer science, the two fields where in

the 1990s the idea of an ecosystem was introduced to explain the respective dynamics of

market competition and artificial life. Third, I consider the role of “ecosystem” as a

developmental frame in business expansion strategies and entrepreneurial public policies to

dominate versus diversify internet markets in the 2000s. The following section focuses on the

use of naturalistic imaginaries in the global startup arena to flesh out its neocolonial aspects.

The last two sections provide some tentative evidence on the most recent iterations of the

metaphor: the hair-splitting attempts in contemporary management literature to distinguish

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“ecosystem” from “platform,” and the introduction of “digital ecosystem” in mainstream

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environmental policy. -p
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Ecological systems: from circuitry to self-organization

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Using “ecosystem” to make sense and legitimize the digital can be seen as an instance within

a much longer history of using ecological analogies to naturalize capitalism (Gandy 2002,
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2006; Ong 2005; Light 2009; Jasanoff and Kim 2015). To fully appreciate the specificity of
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the metaphor, we first need to review the development of ecosystem as a concept, focusing on

a series of legitimacy exchanges between biology, ecology and fields such as engineering,

cybernetics and economics. The term originates from a debate over the legitimate use of

organic analogies in ecology when British botanist Arthur Tansley challenged his American

colleague Frederic Clements’s theorization of ecological communities as “superorganisms”

and introduced the concept of an ecosystem (ecological system) as an alternative (Tansley

1935; Golley 1993). For Tansley, ecosystems were physical objects—ecological “systems in

the sense of the physicists” (Tansley 1935: 297)—comprising organic and inorganic factors
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and comparable to other physical systems, yet ones that exhibited a unique tendency to

stabilize themselves around what he called a “dynamic equilibrium” (291).

Tansley nevertheless conceded that it was warranted to describe ecological communities as

“quasi-organisms” on account of plant, animal and social communities being, like organisms,

integrated wholes—“not merely a loose analogy” as he put it (290). Yet, for this article’s

purposes, the strictly scientific nature of the dispute seems less relevant than Tansley’s

agreement with Clements that ecological principles were “unquestioningly applicable to

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mankind,” therefore useful for social analysis and policy intervention (in Light 2009: 33).

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While he challenged the organic analogy, Tansley’s conception of natural ecosystems as self-
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stabilizing biophysical systems built on Clements’ theories of succession and climax, which
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underpinned various efforts in the US to theorize and plan human settlements as natural areas

(Light 2009). Although premised on challenging the organic analogy, Tansley’s “ecosystem”
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effectively laid the groundwork for blurring the distinction between biophysical, social and
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technological change through the language of systems.

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The concept of an ecosystem was brought into the limelight of ecological research, along with
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establishing the US as the center of the paradigm, through Eugene Odum’s Fundamentals of

Ecology (1953), arguably the single most influential publication in the history of ecosystem

ecology (Golley 1993: 188). However, the key conceptual innovation behind the book, that

ecosystems are self-regulating energetic feedback systems having no clearly defined

geographic boundaries, originated with his younger brother Howard T. Odum. The younger

Odum developed the proposition of his mentor, ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1948) that

ecological systems can be analyzed as cybernetic processes exhibiting features of circular

causality (inspired by the latter’s participation in the influential Macy conferences in the late
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1940s). Odum’s work stands out for an extensive use of diagrams that represent these

ecological processes as self-regulating functional systems of mechanical cogwheels,

metabolic flows and electric circuitry. Through these conceptual and methodological

operations, as environmental historian Sabine Höhler showed, the ecosystem became an

analytical-mathematical framework, one whose limits, scale and standards were dependent on

a scientist’s own point of view (2004: 71).

Did “ecosystem” refer to actual biophysical systems? Or was it a method for modeling

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ecological dynamics across different scales? This never-resolved methodological tension

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allowed Odum to make a series of methodological elisions between ecological inquiry and
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socio-technical expertise. According to historians of science Peter J. Taylor and Ann S. Blum,
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for example, Odum’s representation of ecosystems as energy circuits is underpinned by a

form of technocratic optimism: analogies explored through diagrams are stretched to the point
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where ecological (as well as social) relations are seen as essentially equivalent to, and
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amenable to expertise consonant with, these circuits (Taylor 1988, 2005; Taylor and Blum

1991). Later in his career, Odum embraced the idea that the ecosystem was “its own
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computer,” self-regulating because capable of calculating the consequences of its own activity
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(1971: 270). This perspective contributed to the development of a computational analysis of

the entire planet Earth as a single interconnected global ecosystem, while also prioritizing the

role of capital in assessing environmental impact and which action to prioritize to mitigate it.

Odum’s tireless focus on energy as the foundation of a universal science (a methodology he

described with the neologism “emergy” or embodied energy), along with ever more

generalizing analogies between cogwheels, batteries, computers, food chains and civilization

(Taylor and Blum 1991: 285), led him to insist that ecology is economy and energy is capital.
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His ideas that “we can put dollar values on the ecosystem” (Odum 1971: 297) and that “the

ecosystem and climate have made capital investments in the land” (228) form an important

precursor to the neoliberal conception of ecosystem services.2 However, the subsequent

development of the idea that nature is capital owes less to Odum’s emphasis on self-

regulation than to the paradigm of inherently unstable nature associated with resilience

theory.

While I cannot do justice to the extensive scholarship around resilience (Walker and Cooper

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2011; Nelson 2014; Grove 2018), any account of ecosystems thinking would be insufficient

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without considering the work of C. S. Holling, an influential Canadian ecologist. Holling
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(1971) challenged the notion that ecological systems have or tend towards a stable state and
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stressed how instability and fluctuation contribute to these systems’ capacity to persist.

Building on the premise that “the long-term expectation of stability may be inherently
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destabilizing” (Walker and Cooper 2011: 146), he departed from Tansley and Odum to
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theorize ecosystems as self-organizing, complex adaptive systems. For all that, he was no less

a technocratic optimist, and was even more tireless than Odum in generalizing his
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observations. Holling dedicated a large part of his later career to building transnational,
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transdisciplinary networks promoting resilience in what he called socio-ecological systems,

networks that themselves played a role in installing neoliberal policies for market-based

adaptation to economic flux in and beyond ecology (Nelson 2014).

While many other aspects of ecosystems thinking cannot be fully tracked here, I have

reviewed the development of the concept by highlighting its twin career as a socio-technical

metaphor in ecology and a nature-based analogy applied outside of that science.3 The circuit-

based and computational pedigrees of “ecosystem” anchor a technocratic optimism

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concerning self-regulating or self-organizing systems so that it “serves as a bridge between a

scientific paradigm, a physical object, and a holistic point of view” (Golley 1993: 190). These

various uses of the concept give a sense of urgency to a series of questions as to “which

organisms and relations [are] included and excluded in the ecosystem, what flows through it,

what are its limits and its contents, and how it is accounted for” (Luque-Ayala and Marvin

2020: 37). While existing research on the instrumentalization of ecosystems thinking focuses

primarily on the controversial concept of ecosystem services in neoliberal environmental

policy (Nelson 2014; Dempsey 2016), what of the role of ecosystem as an imaginary of

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digital capitalism beyond the environmental policy field?

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Fierce and fair competition
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In the 1990s, the idea of an ecosystem was introduced in the business and computer fields as a
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form of legitimacy exchange to describe self-generating processes in these fields. It was

marked by a technocratic optimism remarkably similar to those of Odum or Holling,

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predicated on drawing analogies between the behavior of different systems. An early

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influential extension of the concept by a non-ecologist comes from the pen of business

management scholar James F. Moore: his term “business ecosystem” refers to an economic

community comprised of “organisms of the business world” such as firms and customers,

their suppliers and competitors, along with other stakeholders (1996: 9). Introduced in a

Harvard Business Review article titled “Predators and prey: A new ecology of competition”

(1993) and subsequently developed in The death of competition: Leadership and strategy in

the age of business ecosystems (1996), the theory argues that these “organisms” coevolve so

that their capabilities and roles become aligned with the directions set by leading companies
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such as Walmart or IBM. While individual “ecosystem leaders” change over time, what really

matters, Moore argues, is “the function of ecosystem leader” providing value to the

community by enabling members “to move toward shared visions to align their investments,

and to find mutually supportive roles” (1996: 26).

This approach allows Moore to highlight the role of innovation, seeing the stability of

economic systems as the function of their not being at equilibrium. Moore draws inspiration

from the work of anthropologist and one of the forefathers of complexity theory Gregory

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Bateson (another Macy conferences participant), who introduced the term “coevolution” in

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the 1970s. While in ecology coevolution refers to reciprocal changes in interacting species
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(mutualistic or not), Moore’s interest in Bateson has to do more with the power of individuals
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and ideas to effect change from within the system: “as Gregory Bateson noted,” Moore writes

bluntly, “if you change the ideas in a social system, you change the system itself” (1993: 86;
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cf. Turner 2006: 124).4

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This conceptual framework allows Moore to make a scientifically thin analogy between “the
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stages that all business ecosystems pass through” (1993: 76) and the ecological process of
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grasslands being succeeded by conifers and eventually hardwoods (premised on the concept

of climax community which ecology had since long rejected), as well as to put a naturalistic

veneer over crude neo-Darwinian tropes such as that what matters is “not which particular

ecosystems stay alive; rather, it’s only essential that competition among them is fierce and

fair—and that the fittest survive” (86). Yet the scientific validity of Moore’s ecosystem theory

seems insignificant relative to its role as a focal point in the narrative about the transformative

power of business executives’ fresh, unorthodox thinking. For example, the vision that “as an

ecological approach to management becomes more common—as an increasing number of

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executives become conscious of co-evolution and its consequences—the pace of business

change itself will accelerate” simply highlights and justifies the outsized power of executives

to revolutionize capitalism from inside (86). Moore’s influential work has provided an

impetus for a cottage industry of research around business ecology, a field that extends the

metaphors of “keystone species” and “weeds” and notions such as “sea urchins [...] get eaten

by the otters [...] but the community as a whole benefits” to the business realm (Iansiti and

Levien 2004: 76).

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The 1990s were when ecosystems thinking spread across many fields outside of ecology. In

parallel to business ecology, the idea of “digital ecosystem” emerged at the intersections of
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artificial life research and computer science, on the back of hyperboles about the biological
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life of cybernetic machines popularized by early tech gurus (e.g. Kelly 1994). It is associated

with Tierra, a system of computer simulation programs that compete for spare computing
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capacity to self-replicate, developed by Thomas S. Ray (Ray 1992a; cf. Helmreich 1998;
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Hayles 1999). Ray characterized Tierra as a computational “ecosystem” comprised of “digital

organisms” (in Helmreich 1998: 3) and relied on techniques and concepts inspired by natural

evolution such as genetic algorithms and digital biodiversity. He developed a proposal for

NetTierra (Ray 1995), where programs would compete for CPU on the internet to create “a

network-wide biodiversity reserve for digital organisms” (in Cliff and Grand 1999: 78).

The first use of the term “digital ecosystem” comes from the description of Tierra by popular

science writer Roger Lewin (1992) in his influential account of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI).
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Ray built Tierra as a visiting scholar at the SFI, an influential think tank dedicated to unifying

natural and human sciences around the idea that categories as different as biological

organisms, ecological communities, technological networks and civilizations are structurally

equivalent complex systems (the institute included Holling among its board members).

Significantly for my argument, Ray, an ecologist by training, saw Tierra as a logical

continuation of his previous research on evolution and adaptation among plants and animals

(e.g. Ray 1992c): the program, he argued, was not simply a model but “an instantiation of

evolution by natural selection in the computational medium” (in Helmreich 1998: 108).

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Similar to the SFI, Ray saw digital and natural evolutions as not only analytically but also

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ontologically identical, and boasted that “I have created life in my computer” (Ray 1992b);
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Lewin promoted Ray’s narrative by writing that the program contains “a lot of textbook
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ecology” (Lewin 1992: 96).
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The term was picked up by computer scientists Dave Cliff and Stephen Grand to describe
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their 1996 computer game Creatures, in which human users care after autonomous software

agents called “norns” (Cliff and Grand 1999; see also Grand 2001). The goal is to teach
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“norns” basics of language and behavior, administer rewards and punishments, and raise them
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by facilitating interactions with other “norns” and with objects in their virtual world. At the

time of development and writing, Cliff was employed at HP Labs in Bristol and Grand

worked as a Cambridge, UK-based programmer and entrepreneur (he later went on to found

Creature Labs to exploit the game commercially). While Grand was the main author of

Creatures, Cliff, who specialized in evolutionary robotics (and is known primarily for

inventing ZIP, one of the first trading algorithms), supplied the theoretical frame: digital

ecosystems conceived as self-organizing complex systems evolving through interactions

among human users, computer technology and “norns”. In less than three years, there were no
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less than half a million computing nodes and up to five million agents active at any one time

across the internet. Reflecting on its commercial success, Cliff and Grand argued that

Creatures inadvertently created Ray’s vision for NetTierra as a “global digital ecosystem”

(1999: 90).

There are tensions between the metaphor’s scientific emphasis on the idea that the virtual and

natural worlds are shaped by the same evolutionary process, and what Cliff and Grand,

following Ray, refer to as “digital naturalism”. The human user is tasked with “the

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development of ‘culture’ in communities of artificial agents,” for example when they isolate

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“promising-looking ‘wild’ organisms” for “‘domestication’ and subsequent ‘farming’” (Cliff
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and Grand 1999: 83 and 86). Never mind that Cliff and Grand leave the reader at loss as to
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what this means in the context of Creatures: the persistence in their narrative of settler-

colonial tropes of wilderness and domestication, along with the representations of humans as
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civilizing agents, poses questions about the wider cultural implications of the seemingly
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groundbreaking idea that the virtual world is natural.

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According to anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, for example, representing the virtual world as
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a form of “silicon second nature” (in analogy to culture as second nature) mirrors the notion

that “the natural world embod[ies] a computational calculus” (1998: 14). In other words,

computer scientists’ naturalization of the digital mirrors an epistemology discussed earlier

that sees nature as a computer and a form of capital (see also Ray 1992c). To paraphrase

Helmreich (1998), the concept of a digital ecosystem blurs the boundaries between the natural

and the digital, but equally obfuscates the cultures of nature and technology that underpin

such visions. If the use of naturalistic imaginaries is shaped by culture, history and
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institutions, how were the 1990s approaches to business and digital ecosystems integrated in

the context of post-millennial digital capitalism?

The internet and the market

With its roots in HP Labs, the idea of a digital ecosystem was introduced into the business

lexicon by HP’s CEO Carly Fiorina. In 2000, she delivered a keynote address “The digital

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ecosystem” to the meeting of the influential sustainability non-profit World Resources

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Institute (with Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos among the speakers). Fiorina (2000) celebrated the
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emergence of “a single global ecosystem—wired, connected,” in which people possessing
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diverse languages, cultures and tastes are “all part of one ecosystem,” “bumping into one

another, benefiting from each others’ successes and suffering from each others’ failures.” Her
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use of the metaphor drew an emphasis to the globalization of virtual and physical worlds
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being a single process. Yet as HP’s merger with Compaq Fiorina engineered in the early

2000s suggests, the naturalistic notion that digital networks and market economy serve the
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same desirable purpose of connecting people in symbiotic ways needs to be seen against the
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backdrop of HP’s corporate strategy: to expand globally in the emerging PC and internet

markets.

A significant part of this effort was HP’s so-called “e-inclusion” strategy for connecting

developing countries to the internet. This idea originated with HP Labs and was the first in the

high-tech industry aiming to create profit by focusing on the poorest. Fiorina, for example,

was an avid fan of business strategist C. K. Prahalad’s bottom-of-the-pyramid theory that

highlights the role of the corporate sector in helping the global poor enterprise themselves out
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of poverty (Schwittay 2011). Her framing of “digital ecosystem” highlights the significance

of the internet to such a strategy, and of the idea that “the world’s poorest countries can skip

directly to the digital world” to the corporate bottom line (Fiorina 2000).

Fiorina’s metaphor is marked by a slippage of meaning so that it refers simultaneously to

technologies (personal computers, the internet) and market actors (business partners,

regulators, customers). The term foregrounds the nature-like relations of technological

interconnectedness and economic interdependence while imbuing the corporation at their

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center with a veneer of global responsibility. Fiorina’s (2000) speech included a vignette

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about the arrival of the first computer to a small Peruvian community, illustrating how this
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collaborative initiative of a local NGO, a national telephone operator and a foreign
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government brought hope to the impoverished area previously ruled by “communist

guerrillas”. The seemingly off-handed reference to communism is significant as a variant of

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red scare that reveals a set of neocolonial assumptions underlying corporate expansion in the
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Global South. In this context, “communism” is represented not as foreign but as indigenous to

provide a contrasting foil against which to make the elision of the imperative of connecting
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developing countries to the internet with the entrepreneurial imperative appear

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commonsensical.

Despite the failure of HP’s e-inclusion initiative and Fiorina’s eventual ouster from the

company’s leadership, the term “digital ecosystem” stuck as a lens through which to make

sense of what was happening at the intersections of computer technology and business. Yet

there are further slippages of meaning depending on whether the metaphor highlights

expansion, competition or regulation. For example, Moore (2003; 2006) has synthesized

Fiorina’s and his own earlier concept to formulate the idea of “digital business ecosystem” as
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a universal model for good governance. The uncritical adoration of Silicon Valley’s culture

aligns with an emphasis on the role of digital entrepreneurship as a beacon of democracy in

authoritarian regimes and as an anti-monopoly instrument in European public policy.

Empowering small businesses

An important milestone in the adoption of an ecosystem imaginary in the public policy arena

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is a 2007 European Commission (EC) report titled Digital Business Ecosystems (EC 2007), a

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result of the “eEurope 2002: An information society for all” draft action plan prepared by the
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EC for the 2000 European Council meeting in Feira (Nachira 2002). Edited by an
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interdisciplinary and cross-sector team of technology experts, scientific officers, economists

and communication scholars counting more than thirty contributors cutting across the private
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and public sector and academia, the somewhat long-winding report synthesizes discussions
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around digital and business ecosystems to introduce the idea of digital business ecosystem as

a focal point for local economic development in the EU. The report draws heavily on Moore,
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and combines philosophical insights around biology, ecology and complexity with the inquiry
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into the role of digitalization in unlocking local, small and medium enterprise (SME)-led

economic development.

A constructivist perspective on technological change is taken to explore how distributed ICT-

based solutions can serve as natural correctives to monopolistic/oligopolistic tendencies: by

fostering shared knowledge production and collective intelligence, digitalization facilitates a

competitive market. The report extends the notion that living organisms are self-organizing

systems into the micro-economic arena. It adopts the biological theories of Stuart Kauffman
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(a former faculty of the SFI) and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (the authors of the

concept of autopoiesis) as a conceptual framework for the putative “science of digital

ecosystems” (EC 2007: 25) aimed at maintaining “favourable conditions for business” (4)

without the need for top-down regulation. For example, the question “how do we bootstrap

and then preserve the autopoietic properties of digital ecosystems?” (xiv) leads to the insight

that “the distributed P2P architecture of digital ecosystems enables them to self-correct by

diffusing it again, in this manner preserving the socio-economic structure that made this

emergence possible” (xii).

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“Digital ecosystem” also underpins the EC’s strategic focus at the intersections of
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entrepreneurship/SME and local/regional development policies, when it justifies the
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preference for “the establishment of environmental and structural conditions that empower

SMEs” (xii) over providing direct subsidies to individual SMEs. However, the meaning of the
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term oscillates between referring to a digital representation of the “real” economy, to a digital
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infrastructure supporting that economy, and to a distributed technical system. Other

ambiguities came to the fore during the follow-up EC FP6-funded project “Open philosophies
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for associative autopoietic digital ecosystems” (2006–2010), which reflected on theoretical

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and methodological limits to developing a “unified theory of digital ecosystems” (explicitly

asked for by the EC), but nevertheless highlighted the possibility and benefit of integrating

social, natural and computer sciences around the “practical joint endeavour” of defining

digital ecosystem’s “architecture” and “socio-economic potential” (Dini, Iqani and Mansell

2011: 15, 7 and 24).

While the underlying logic beneath these theoretical summersaults might seem suspect, the

EC’s digital ecosystem narrative gives a semblance of scientific legitimacy to harnessing

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digital innovation policies to the imperative of market competition. According to

anthropologist Aihwa Ong, for example, ecosystem and other ecological terms have entered

the lexicon of developmental technocrats to capture “new forms of linkages, exchanges, and

feedback loops that are being forged between the distribution of knowledge flows and the

technical resources, and techniques of management” (2004: 339). The emphasis in this

narrative is on economic geography, and the notion that digitalization helps local firms

become globally competitive, also points to the significance of cities, regions and other areas

being imagined as entrepreneurial ecosystems.

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The Silicon Valley effect
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The transmission of ecosystems thinking from the center to the periphery is an important,
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neocolonial aspect of the metaphor’s travels. Of particular interest is the cognate idea of an
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entrepreneurial ecosystem (at times described as “startup ecosystem”) which underlines the

role of local relations as a source of competitive advantage in the global digital economy.
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Theorizing economic value as a function of place and centrality puts “entrepreneurial

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ecosystem” in the tradition of business cluster theory, but the term is used almost exclusively

in the context of digital startups. The metaphor elides the imperatives of digitalization,

competitiveness and local restructuring to foreground the role of Silicon Valley as the model

relative to which other (prospective) centers of digital innovation must position themselves (in

contrast to the cluster theory view of Silicon Valley as one cluster among many other mostly

“non-digital” clusters; e.g. Porter 1998).

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The entrepreneurial ecosystem metaphor naturalizes digitalization as the best way for

addressing the competitiveness challenge at the global periphery. It has been popularized

especially in second- and third-tier cities in the US, along with regions such as Northern and

Eastern Europe and the Middle East, functioning as a lens through which local policy and

business leaders internalize the imperative to emulate Silicon Valley and justify the

desirability, if not inevitability, of promoting digital entrepreneurial culture. Yet what

particular understandings of nature help these actors make sense of, and thereby reproduce,

what could be called the Silicon Valley effect?

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I draw evidence from two influential publications: an academic article that first theorized
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Silicon Valley as an ecosystem, and a book that helped popularize the term. In “Flexible re-
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cycling and high-technology entrepreneurship,” Homa Bahrami and Stuart Evans (1995), who

wear two hats as business management scholars and business professionals active in Silicon
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Valley, argue that the region’s high-technology economy challenges the link between
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permanence and success and points to the significance of flexibility as a condition of success.

Silicon Valley, they write, is “more than a cluster” and operates “in much the same vein as a
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natural ecosystem” (Bahrami and Evans 1995: 63). The metaphor refers to “the incessant
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formation of a multitude of specialized, diverse entities which feed off, support, and interact

with one another” (63). The entities they refer to are not only organizations such as

universities or investors but include social networks, forms of subjectivity and other “soft”

factors.

The argument oscillates between analyzing the reasons behind Silicon Valley’s economic

success and creating the impression that “Silicon Valley sprouted spontaneously” (64).

Without referring to ecological resilience theory—they would turn to it later (Bahrami and
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Evans 2005: 32–34)—their argument is premised on the notion that the market is inherently

unstable. For an individual business, market adaptation is a perpetual process. An

entrepreneurial ecosystem such as Silicon Valley, however, is made robust through a high

failure rate: “the demise of one firm invariably leads to the formation of others” (Bahrami and

Evans 1995: 61). Instability and ephemerality are key to local economic growth: the lesson

that Bahrami and Evans draw from the study of Silicon Valley is that local policy makers

around the world need to sacrifice employment stability in order to build competitive

environments for startups to flourish. The naturalistic metaphor justifies a highly flexible

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political economy that disregards individual failure for the sake of promoting a place-based

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culture of entrepreneurship. -p
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While Bahrami and Evans provided a theoretical frame, the popularity of “entrepreneurial

ecosystem” lies with pundits who spread the ideas beyond Silicon Valley. Among these,
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Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, a 2012 book by

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MIT-educated serial entrepreneur and startup guru Brad Feld, deserves attention for helping

make “ecosystem” a common idiom among the startup communities in second- and third-tier
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cities. Written in the wake of the 2008 crisis and Barack Obama’s Startup America initiative,
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Feld draws on his personal involvement as an entrepreneur and investor in Boulder, Colorado

(with some anecdotal evidence from places such as Omaha, Nebraska and Iceland). His goals

are to demonstrate that a startup community can be created “in any city in the world” (Feld

2012: xii) and to give the reader “the tools to create an amazing startup community in [their]

city” (2).

Feld cements the status of Silicon Valley as a paradigmatic model despite insisting that each

place is unique: “How can we create our own Silicon Valley? … You can’t—you only think
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you want to” (170). The denial is an affirmation that idealizes the Californian region for its

“intangible” values rather than successful startups or venture capital. As a model

entrepreneurial ecosystem, Silicon Valley refers to a community that appreciates

technological innovation, a culture that encourages risk-taking and a place where young

entrepreneurs continuously collide. Especially significant are hackathons, tech meetups,

accelerators and other intermediary activities that engage “the entire entrepreneurial stack”

(28) to spread the startup culture in the wider society. Disarmingly simple schemes such as

ecosystems being made of “leaders” (entrepreneurs) and “feeders” (everyone else) are

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premised not only on the idea that startups are saviors at a time of economic crisis but also

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that they are “pillars of their community” (26) in a cultural sense.
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Startup Communities is reminiscent of the phenomenon of market populism, theorized by

economist journalist Thomas Frank as a stance in which “the entrepreneur, by virtue of his or
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her close relationship to the market [is seen as] the true embodiment of the ‘common man’”
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(2001: 200). The entrepreneurial ecosystem narrative takes market populism to the next level,

so that digital innovation and economic risk-taking are seen as paragons of civic
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responsibility. The ecosystem metaphor works by representing the entrepreneur as an every

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person who is nevertheless at the helm of societal evolution, while mystifying the political

economic criteria for entrepreneurial success and how its benefits are distributed across

society.

The idea of an entrepreneurial ecosystem contrasts with the influential theory of the

entrepreneurial state (Mazzucato 2018) in that it foregrounds the importance of (vaguely

defined) culture—rather than state—in technological innovation and economic growth. The

metaphor has been used, for example, in Austin, Texas, in the context of enrolling urban
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culture and greening to “innervate the environments of entrepreneurship” (Levenda and

Tretter 2020: 491), but also in Finnish and Italian digital economy strategies to highlight the

role of urban spaces where “start-up entrepreneurs become involved in collaborative activities

related to co-creation, co-option and enriching interaction” (Moisio and Rossi 2020: 5). In a

somewhat different sense, the branding of entire countries such as Israel or Estonia (Senor

and Singer 2009; Kask 2021) as entrepreneurial ecosystems highlights the nexus between

digital capitalism and ethnocentric interpretations of national culture.

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At the economic (semi-)periphery, the idea of an entrepreneurial ecosystem has helped

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elevate Silicon Valley into a paradigmatic model for local development. The metaphor gives a
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friendly face to the Silicon Valley effect: the imperative of attracting startup capital by
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instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in everyday people. The significance of digitalization and

finance is connected with an emphasis on local culture to build a myth of entrepreneurial

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ecosystems as tight-knit communities with unique skills, values and identities that blend
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economic and cultural factors. The reference to a natural system helps direct public policies

and civic action towards building a strong entrepreneurial culture as a common goal, but at
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the same time represents this intervention as a self-generating process: a place thriving from
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the bottom up.

Ecosystems versus platforms

Having traced the “entrepreneurial ecosystem” narrative to the Silicon Valley effect and the

neocolonial aspects of its internalization at the semi-periphery, this penultimate section asks

why the idea of an ecosystem remains attractive in the Western digital economy arena. It is
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argued that, relative to the topographical metaphor of a platform (Gillespie 2010),

“ecosystem” allows tech firms to communicate their commitment to complementarity and

cooperation even as they seek to dominate the market by gobbling up startups and locking in

customers via data and digital access—playing on the two meanings of “trust” so to speak.

A case in point is a series of MIT Sloan Management Review articles on thriving, surviving

and driving growth in digital ecosystems (Weill and Woerner 2015, 2017; Sebastian, Weill

and Woerner 2020). Their main theme is to distinguish the ecosystem model from a more

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linear value chain, so as to theorize how technology firms capture value from ecosystems by

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controlling not only the production but also the customer end of business. Acknowledging the
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work both of value chain theorists such as Porter and of Moore’s business ecosystem, the term
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digital ecosystem is in these articles inflected so that it refers to the process of business

ecosystems becoming increasingly digital: users and businesses being interconnected via the
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internet and digital platforms, in addition to logistical supply chains and in-person shopping
na

(cf. Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2020).

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This is exemplified by a contrast between Walmart and Amazon, where “Amazon gets to see
Jo

the data on all of the activity in its ecosystem, enabling fine-tuning and identification of new

opportunities while it extracts rents from the ecosystem” (Weill and Woerner 2015: 29). A

company’s digital presence seems now to be also a necessary condition for participating in the

ecosystem as such—significantly, Walmart was an example of a successful business

ecosystem for Moore (1996), while in these articles it is an example of what ecosystem is not.

Four business models for the digital era are distinguished—suppliers, omnichannel

businesses, modular producers and ecosystem drivers—to highlight the advantages of the last

mentioned. Ecosystem drivers achieve comparatively highest margins, by building brand

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loyalty, customer experience and consumer feedback and thereby creating an ecosystem of

services where to extract rents from consumers and providers. Although there is a degree of

overlap between the terms “ecosystem” and “platform,” the latter appears to be relegated to a

more technical level as a tool serving the overall corporate imperative to become ecosystem

drivers. Put otherwise, while the challenge for companies is to integrate many and

heterogeneous platforms—for example by having different vendors selling similar products—

their overall strategy and goal is aligned more with the notion of controlling the ecosystem.

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“Ecosystem” is the more expansive term also in the World Economic Forum (WEF) briefing

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paper “Platforms and ecosystems: Enabling the digital economy” (written in collaboration
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with Deloitte): the platform is understood a business model through which firms aspire to
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become “ecosystem orchestrators” (Jacobides, Sundarajan and Van Alstyne 2019: 15). The

goal is to exploit network effects to quickly scale and eventually to create and occupy space
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where others (must) compete and collaborate. Other examples of defining platforms as
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components of higher-order ecosystems include the quip from strategic management literature

that “an aspiring Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Ma needs to start from a platform business that
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solves a unique customer pain point, perfect it and then build an ecosystem around it”
Jo

(Shipilov and Burelli 2020) and the insight, presented during the US Congress (2019) session

“The digital ecosystem: New paths to entrepreneurship” that, as “online economy evolves,

digital platforms are growing into networks referred to as digital ecosystems”.

At the same time, the ecosystem narrative provides a veneer of responsibility that “platform”

does not and cannot: for example, the WEF paper explains away the conflict between Uber’s

users and drivers as a challenge of “being a fair ombudsman for the ecosystem’s various

conflicting interests” (Jacobides, Sundarajan and Van Alstyne 2019: 10). This suggests that
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the focus on “ecosystem” in recent business policy debates is also due to the naturalistic

association with environmental ethics, especially in response to a mounting “techlash” against

Big Tech (Morozov 2019; Dyer-Witheford 2020). Unlike “platform,” the ecosystem metaphor

captures a subtle but ideologically significant tension between the two meanings of “trust”:

controlling the market versus appearing trustworthy.

The planet as ecosystem, an ecosystem for the planet

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This article has focused primarily on the political economic role of nature-based metaphors,
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but digital ecosystems have now been introduced in environmental policy too. Pioneering in
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this regard is the 2019 discussion paper “The case for a digital ecosystem for the

environment” by the United Nations Environment Assembly, whose objective is, as per the
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paper’s subtitle, to “bring together data, algorithms and insights for sustainable development”
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(UNEA 2019). Developed under the aegis of UN Environment and UN Science Policy

Business Forum through consultation with more than eighty private, public, third sector and
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intergovernmental organizations (ranging from IBM to The Intergovernmental Panel on

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Climate Change and Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation), the paper aims to harness the efforts of

these and other organizations to generate high quality, integrated environmental data and use

these data as a basis for influencing corporate strategies, consumer behavior and public

governance towards sustainable development goals and improved resilience.

The digital ecosystem refers primarily to an antimonopoly perspective in which data are

generated, exchanged and analyzed through a distributed, interconnected and interoperable

network of infrastructures, datasets and algorithms. The UN foresees the process of

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integrating various old and new data sources to create, analyze and act on a wide range of

environmental data. The imagined digital ecosystem combines traditional data sources such as

administrative records and census surveys with satellite observations, citizen science mobile

applications, internet of things and other (what the organization refers to as) “frontier

technologies,” including yet unknown ones, to tackle pollution, biodiversity loss and other

climate change issues.

A key premise is that private companies can be incentivized to share the environmental data

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they own with governments and the wider public. The discussion paper offers a critical

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perspective on the uneven nature of digital infrastructures controlled by a small number of
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companies and countries, but is wrong to assume that decentralization guarantees
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democratization. While the digital ecosystem is imagined as a “global public good,” the paper

acknowledges—but doesn’t elaborate on—the challenges posed by the present requirement

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for it to have “a clear value-added business case” (UNEA 2019: 6).

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Environmental geographer Jessica McLean (2020) interpreted the paper as a form of “wishful
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thinking” symptomatic of the UN’s ecomodernist belief in capitalist technological

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solutionism. The faith in a vaguely defined digitalization to fix current environmental issues

reflects the ideological role of “ecosystem” as a future imaginary. It helps frame the economic

and technological change as a natural process so that “we will not be able to achieve […]

environmental sustainability without utilizing frontier technologies” and even “proactively

‘scouting’ new relevant technologies” (UNEA 2019: 3 and 6). The paper suggests that the

digital ecosystem has “adaptive properties of self-organization” defined by “seemingly

individual or autonomous entities” competing and collaborating “much like [in] natural

ecosystems” (5). From such a dynamic naturalistic perspective, the UN acknowledges that “a
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shift in the global political economy of environmental data is needed” (3) but limits that shift

to the technologically-mediated process of informing consumers and companies to make

better decisions on the market.

As McLean succinctly put it, “the actual political economy that shapes those processes in the

digital ecosystem are very different to any natural ecosystem” (2020: 2). The role of political

and economic agency is mystified when the imagined digital ecosystem is described as self-

organizing: the digital ecosystem is clearly not a product of natural evolution but a plan of

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action shaped by uneven capitalist development. However, the focus on metaphoric transfer

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has revealed that our understanding of what a natural ecosystem is is itself indebted to a series
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of analogies with technological systems. With the UN’s ambition to build a digital ecosystem
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for the planet, the journey of the metaphor has come full circle, as it were. We have seen how

the representation of digital companies and technologies as analogous to natural ecosystems

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had built on the representation of the biophysical environment as a computing ecosystem, and
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have now arrived at a green capitalist frontier where the by now thoroughly uncontroversial

idea of a digital ecosystem is harnessed to sustain the biophysical environment itself.

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Conclusions

Why and how do metaphors matter for the emerging study of digital nature? This article has

contributed primarily by examining the ideological work of introducing naturalistic models in

the socio-technical domain of digital political economy, while emerging evidence opens up a

political ecology perspective on the role these models play in perpetuating technological

reductionism concerning how societies relate to and manage the biophysical environment. A
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critical analysis of metaphors points to processes of translation, mutation and anchoring

within the unevenly developing digital capitalism. Metaphors are media of legitimacy

exchange. According to Geoffrey Bowker (1993), legitimacy exchange occurs when “[a]n

isolated scientific worker making an outlandish claim could gain rhetorical legitimacy by

pointing to support from another field—which in turn referenced the first worker’s field to

support its claim” (in Turner 2006: 25). The concept can be usefully extended to understand

legitimization practices between science and other fields such as technology, economy or

policy. Having helped legitimize the once-outlandish claim that (digital) technology exhibits

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the same properties as biophysical ecosystems, “digital ecosystem” has in turn been used to

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lend legitimacy to the wishful thinking that data and digitalization alone can put the planet on
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an environmentally sustainable path.
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Making the analogy ubiquitous and uncontroversial, the digital ecosystem mantra has helped
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both naturalize orientations towards digital solutions in the worlds of business, policy and
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prioritize digital solutions over political challenges in the environmental policy arena. But the

idea of an ecosystem had never been “pure” in the first place. A critical study of legitimation
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exchange entails what McKenzie Wark (2015) describes as tracing metaphors back to the
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process of their production (rather than to their origins in the sense of unadulterated meaning).

This article has shown that circuits, computers and other socio-technical objects are intrinsic

to ecosystem’s intellectual history. It is a deep yet vague imaginary whose emphasis varies by

protagonist and context. Tensions in 20th-century ecology as to whether ecosystem means a

spatially bounded physical system, an analytical device or a holistic point of view are

mirrored in the overlapping emphases that experts, pundits and policy makers placed on

place, scalability and global connectivity in the political economy of digital ecosystems.
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Since the 1990s, “ecosystem” has found its home in the expansive and expanding arena

encompassing business management, computer science, urban economy and public and

environmental policy. Various formulations of “digital ecosystem,” along those of the

adjacent terms “business ecosystem” and “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” point to tensions

between firms seeking to maximize revenue by occupying the position of an “ecosystem

orchestrator,” their communication exploiting the idea that (in an analogy to keystone species

in natural ecosystems) there is a public benefit to corporate leadership, regulators pinning

their hopes on digital technology to foster economic growth and environmental resilience

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while challenging monopolistic behavior, and the market populist conceptions of small

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entrepreneurs as avatars of the common man. We have seen that there are several imaginaries
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of the ecosystem that, depending on disciplinary, institutional and geographic factors, evoke
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new forms of human and non-human intelligence enabled by computers; express global

corporations’ neocolonial ambitions to expand in emerging markets; provide a conceptual

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frame for local and regional policies designed to even out the uneven development of
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capitalism; place the onus for climate action on individual consumers and companies to input,

and adjust their behavior relative to, environmental data; and serve as an ideological leverage
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for local elites to integrate neoliberal, nationalistic and techno-utopian policies. Ecosystem is
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an important but messy organizing metaphor for debates and practices around the digital

expressing miscellaneous things: the sheer extent and complexity of late-capitalist and digital

cultures; diverse agencies or places that have lives of their own yet remain connected to a

larger whole through competitive and/or symbiotic relations; environmental opportunities and

colonizing tendencies brought about by global digital infrastructures; the challenge of

introducing self-organization, autopoiesis and complexity as governance principles; and even

the notion that survival-of-the-fittest type behavior is natural.

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While attentive to concrete differences between the natural environment, technical

infrastructures and political economy, the study of ecosystem as a traveling metaphor has

revealed that the claims that ecologists, technology experts and political-economic players

have made about nature, computers and capital have been mutually reinforcing in support of a

technological optimism that dulls the edge of capitalist critique. The journey of “digital

ecosystem” belongs to a longer history of using nature-based metaphors to justify capitalism,

standing out as a form of neo-naturalism that mystifies political economic agency and

obscures power through analogies with dynamic, self-generating and complex nature (as

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opposed to those emphasizing the immutability of the natural order). The metaphor has

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prioritized the imperative of adapting to—and downplayed the possibility of challenging—our
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erratic digital capitalism.
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Notes

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Declaration of competing interest

I declare that there are no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that
could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

1
For example, the Marxist idea of totality seems to perform some of the same conceptual as well as political

work as “ecosystem,” but in a leftist and critical context rather than in liberal or technocratic one. I thank a

reviewer for this point.

2
The concept of ecosystem services has been popularized by Odum’s student Robert Costanza and the field of

ecological economics (Røpke 2004; Dempsey 2016).

3
In particular the concepts of the biosphere, which combines an emphasis on geochemical processes with the

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representation of the planet as a global intelligent ecosystem (Höhler 2004; Taylor 2005), and holism, which

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postulates the existence of self-regulating entities larger than humans (and has a formidable anti-democratic,

racist legacy) (Golley 1993; Harrington 1996). There is no space here either to trace “ecosystem” to the longer
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intellectual histories of providence, the idea of the invisible hand, and other notions crossing theology, political
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theory and moral philosophy (Mirowski 1994; Sheehan and Wahrman 2015).
4
Bateson’s formulation of coevolution as a “power to create context” (1979: 47) inspired also the adoption of
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the term in the humanities (most famously by Deleuze and Guattari) and is usually celebrated as part of the

paradigmatic shift towards a putatively more humane second-order cybernetics.

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