Ecosystems as metaphors

An excellent essay by Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber about the extent to which employing that metaphor is deeply unhelpful:

Another day, another exhortation to join an “ecosystem” that’s anything but. […] These kinds of proprietary and deterministic architectures are called ecosystems so often that we’ve stopped noticing. And that’s kind of the point. We need to start seeing this metaphor again, and what it’s hiding in plain sight.