Your platform is not an ecosystem

December 8, 2022 8:02 AM

Maria Farrell explains why "plantations" is a better term. Metaphors work best when we consciously use them as tools to look with, rather than as the whole thing we’re seeing.

There are two responses to the ubiquity and insidious violence of this metaphor. The short one: 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’?

posted by kingless (27 comments total)

*winces* For someone talking about the importance of metaphor and objecting to a particular metaphor in a reasonable and thoughtful way, I wish she'd taken a few minutes to consider that "plantation" has different meanings in other parts of the English-speaking word than it does in Ireland. It's not just "violence and imperialism," it's chattel slavery, and that's probably not a suitable subject for use as a metaphor, especially not at the behest of white people.
posted by praemunire at 8:20 AM on December 8, 2022 [49 favorites]

praemunire: I wince as much as anyone when I see the word 'plantation' being used as a luxury brand. But surely it can be used as a tool to think with? All the article is suggesting is that the idea of 'digital plantations' might shock us into thinking about the unconscious assumptions in the metaphor of the 'digital ecosystem'.

In the same way, it's surely possible to talk about wage slavery without necessarily suggesting that the situation of workers in, say, a Foxconn plant in China is equivalent in every respect to the situation of slaves on a sugar plantation in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
posted by verstegan at 9:07 AM on December 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I think the author has been reading too many tech/web3 press releases. I rarely hear anyone use the term "ecosystem" outside of marketing materials, or vacuous web3 proclamations.

The once-neutral term "platform" now reads as "platform, which can be pulled under you for any reason" and people are cautioned to work on top of one when the owner of the platform has differing objectives. On the other hand, companies all want to create one so they can charge rent for doing as little as possible.
posted by meowzilla at 9:08 AM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

All the article is suggesting is that the idea of 'digital plantations' might shock us into thinking about the unconscious assumptions in the metaphor of the 'digital ecosystem'.

Again, understanding that the immediate historical associations for Irish people will be different (though still quite negative), there are some references that just shouldn't be deployed for shock value. They're for when there's a strong case for literal equivalence. Whatever you're experiencing using Android products, it's incommensurable with American chattel slavery.
posted by praemunire at 9:45 AM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Literally when I saw the word plantation here I knew there'd be objections to using it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:24 AM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I wince as much as anyone when I see the word 'plantation' being used as a luxury brand

Plantation weddings are still a thing, last I saw.
posted by doctornemo at 11:02 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

...yeah, that's another thing people shouldn't be doing these days.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:20 AM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Plantation weddings are still a thing, last I saw.

And still thought to be trivializing a horrible period in American history.

Some words carry more meaning than others, and if you're trying to push a conversation forward dragging those ones in will just drag you down. Your choice.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:23 AM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Nicholas Carr, 2006:

Digital sharecropping

A while back I wrote that Web 2.0, by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.


And from Sonia Simone, 2015

Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy

Your content on facebook, YouTube, &c. should be directing customers to your URL. Not your content to facebook, YouTube, &c.

So, yes you are “renting” by buying hosting, but that is more like getting different doorkeepers and house hands than it is getting new land. No one cares if you get a new doorkeeper or a new house hand, but they get pissed off when they try to drive to your plantation and it’s burnt down and you don’t live there no more with no sign saying you moved to another plantation.
posted by Ayn Marx at 1:01 PM on December 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Since the plantation metaphor is getting most of the attention here, it may be worth quoting exactly how the author is using this metaphor:

A plantation is a hierarchical, exploitative monoculture. In agriculture, it’s “an .. estate, generally centred on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop”. 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. Amazon’s warehouses and proprietary, spyware-based web services arm are plantations, with all the connotations of colonialism and coerced labour the metaphor carries. Its marketplace for sellers binds them into literal share-cropping, an exploitative type of tenancy that binds farmers to land they’ll never own. Facebook’s hard-right political pollution of each country it operates in echoes the ecological damage of how single crop, intensive plantations do great secondary damage, destroying habitats and biodiversity, while generating vast profits for a tiny ownership class. We already have metaphors that describe exactly what these companies do. We need to use them.

While certainly dramatic, I personally don't feel that the author is deploying this metaphor carelessly or without understanding the implications. Also, this metaphor only serves as a jumping off point to the rest of the blogpost which is mainly a discussion of if/what/how biological ecosystem metaphors can be used to think about tech systems.
posted by mhum at 3:06 PM on December 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

A plantation is a hierarchical, exploitative monoculture.

In North American history, a plantation is a site of systematized forced labor, destruction of culture, forced religious conversion, rape, torture, and murder. I recognize that that is not the only usage (e.g.), but it is a very prominent one and you can't define it away.
posted by praemunire at 3:20 PM on December 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

While certainly dramatic, I personally don't feel that the author is deploying this metaphor carelessly or without understanding the implications

I think if the author fully understood the implications of the word as used in North America, they would have openly addressed that upfront.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:29 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

> Tell Me No Lies: "I think if the author fully understood the implications of the word as used in North America, they would have openly addressed that upfront."

Fair enough. Perhaps if she had situated the metaphor as "Irish plantation" (which I'm not sure is an actual term?), that would have been sufficient.
posted by mhum at 3:36 PM on December 8, 2022

Perhaps if she had situated the metaphor as "Irish plantation" (which I'm not sure is an actual term?), that would have been sufficient.

I definitely think so. And honestly it’s implied if you know the author of the piece is Irish. But that’s not how the internet works unfortunately.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:38 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

It seems like the author is using the metaphor honestly, but hasn't recognised the extent to which the word is loaded to people in the US. I don't think using the term 'Irish Plantation' would solve the issue because people will either have no idea what she's talking about or still jump straight to being triggered by the word. There's no way to use that word and avoid the triggering for huge numbers of people.

It's a real shame, because the metaphor is valid in many ways on its face and the argument that using 'ecosystem' to describe something that is nothing like an actual ecosystem is misleading seems sound to me. I don't know what a better word is, unfortunately.
posted by dg at 3:50 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Can't we just leave that word next to the dumpster and make one up?

Bitfarm
VInyard
GITranch
APIboretum
AND/ORchard
posted by CynicalKnight at 5:29 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

In English-speaking agricultural science and ecology, 'plantation' is used to mean monocropping. Yes, even by scientists in the US. Most commonly here I hear it used to refer to tree farms. Georgia is full of "pine plantations", which are not real forests, but places where pine trees are grown in nice straight rows for 15-20 years before harvest for pulp which is used to make paper and things like laminate furniture. Just like 'ecology' and 'ecosystem' have specific technical meanings to us that are different from how they're used colloquially. This author correctly defined an ecosystem as ecologists use it (all the organisms in the same place at the same time and the surrounding physical environment), and she is using 'plantation' the way we would, too. I think her problem is that it does no good to use the proper meanings of ecology technical language as metaphors to a non-ecological audience.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:25 PM on December 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

I have to agree; swap out “plantation” with “concentration camp” and I think that’s a good start to understanding the issue here.
posted by rhymedirective at 7:44 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Not an American and completely taken aback by the turn this thread has taken. In my country too "plantation" is in regular use in its cultivation sense. Could we acknowledge the valence for US English speakers and leave it at this point? The issues with the word seem to have been very well covered at this point.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:09 PM on December 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

plantations were/are also factories, in the United States. Now mostly petrochemical factories, which include some of the largest carbon emitters on earth.
posted by eustatic at 12:37 AM on December 9, 2022

In North American history, a plantation is a site of systematized forced labor, destruction of culture, forced religious conversion, rape, torture, and murder.

Within the sense of political geography which is closer to this meaning than a strict agricultural one, don't worry! In today's corporate plantations of much of the global south, that's still the same. Ironically for the purpose of this article and the extent to which corporate social media has led to a degradation of democracy in many countries, as well as the predominantly non-western labour that drives the basic moderation staff when it's actually employed or just extremely cheap IT vendors such as Drupal developers etc that builds the infra of the tech offerings that opened the article, the usage is more pertinent than perhaps intended. (Though strictly on the labour point, at least there's still some choice for global south tech workers compared to the migrant labour driving the plantations)
posted by cendawanita at 3:40 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think her problem is that it does no good to use the proper meanings of ecology technical language as metaphors to a non-ecological audience.

I agree -- As I was reading I did find myself bumping into the limitations of the metaphor (e.g. in the claim that an artificial environment won't have emergent properties), and was wondering what was lacking in reorienting the moral value of a "gated neighbourhood" or "walled garden" instead? But then I think I answered my own question.
posted by cendawanita at 3:46 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean, I think the author is actually trying to borrow the historical baggage of plantations looking at their own definition. As a British person I definitely don't think that language is great, and makes the metaphor seem confused.

"Amazon’s warehouses and proprietary, spyware-based web services arm are plantations, with all the connotations of colonialism and coerced labour the metaphor carries"

That seems much closer to the historical connotations of plantation than the ecological ones. If you wanted just the ecological one it doesn't come with any real negative connotations (in fact, mostly positive ones!), but I think the author wants it to have those!
posted by Cannon Fodder at 5:59 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

The ecological use of 'plantation' is entirely negative. A plantation tree farm is a near lifeless shell that might have some appearance of an ecosystem at first glance but has lost all its native species and most of its ecosystem functions and services as a result. It is sold to people as a 'forest', but is in fact nothing like a forest.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:03 AM on December 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

We get it, Americans: someone used an English language word in a technically correct way but which you disapprove of from your culturally-specific perspective.
posted by Rumple at 12:00 PM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

They say plantation, I say slave labor camp.
posted by aiq at 12:36 PM on December 9, 2022

More on hydropsyche’s point, the managed-ness of agricultural plantations is directly related to the managed-ness of labor on them. The ecological and political effects arent distinguishable AIUI. They weren’t in Ireland under English management, either; I expect that’s part of an Irish political scientist’s point.

Im USian and would be very leery of myself using the word as a metaphor, but I got used to it in discussions of agroecology with people from around the world.
posted by clew at 1:04 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]