Parasites, Symbionts, and the Scabs

What happens when a product doesn't co-exist with others in its ecosystem? When products are static but exist within a mutable world? When the products encourage replacement over renewal or repair? What opportunities does that present to other ecosystem actors?

Following on from last week's writing on building within an open source ecosystem and working on the rehype-jsoncanvas project, it feels like maybe an opportune time to finish. That project is one where the ecosystem invites incremental, open, and unexpected additions. Most product ecosystems aren't like that.

Late last summer and in the fall, I was investing some time in relearning and updating my electronics skills. Like many, I'm pretty capable when it comes to arduino and pi projects, but had never gone beyond the perfboard stage. So I decided to learn how to design a PCB. This introduced the opportunity for a parasitic product. I've written a bit about that unfinished project here, which was originally part of this post but got edited out.

Anyway, theres a helpful definition of inter-species relationships captured by 19th century mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary, which frames interactions from a few different angles:

This idea that there are six types of relationships along a spectrum of positive, neutral, negative is a helpful way to frame things. But then, if we take this from the perspective of a two by two, we end up with something like this. So symbiosis (Positive x Positive) becomes the likely ideal, but ultimately parasitism isn't that bad — is it? The spectrum down to competition seems like a valuable threshold.

Parasite, Symbionts, Scavenger, Scab

So where does my little project rest its hat.

Parasites (Positive/Neutral-Negative)

Parasites play a selfish survival role in an ecosystem, where they subvert an existing system for their own ends. This selfish motivation can result in a positive, for example, round worms (a parasite) can apparently boot immune response in a host — albeit with the motivation of making the host a more respective environment for reproduction.

In my little project's case, parasite is probably still an appropriate term. It replaces the brain of the system and leverages the resources around it — maybe closer to the zombie-fungus that the Last of Us game/show reminded us all of. It extends the utility of the object as well, and in my version of the board, I was designing it explicitly to fit into the zigbee-powered smart home ecosystem.

Symbiont (Positive/Positive)

Symbiotic creatures have some positive or net-neutral interaction with the species they're bonded with. The classic examples are clown fish being cleaned by sea anemone (and feeding those creatures in the process), or fish hitching a ride on larger fauna like sea turtles or sharks.

Apart from the excising of that little green board, my project feels a fair bit like this as well. It saps a bit of power and presents a risk to the product (swapping out the attached PCB can kill the existing board, after all), but in exchange opens it up to a wider ecosystem and extends its potential shelf-life. It turns a superfluous toy into a tool.

Scavenger (Negative/Neutral)

What about the product lifecycle itself? Scavengers are creatures that consume the dead — basically left overs within the ecosystem. This isn't just the classic hyenas and vulture carrion eaters either. Termites are scavengers of dead plan materials, and creatures like worms and mites are a form of scavenger called detritivores. Electronics projects have a lovely history with this activity, with a classic example being folk modernizing old A/V enclosures, from midcentury modern consoles to this unbelievably cool raspberry-pi powered VFD display.

This is a classic "decay of digital things" kind of tech, which I actually argue projects like Littleprinter.club belong to, in a "software scavenger" mode. The Little Printer is dead tech because its server strings were cut. Connected objects like that can't live without their cloud, so they died. Any attempts to reuse the corpse left behind becomes a scavenger activity, but a positive one. It's not subverting something that lives, but rather leveraging something that has died.

Scab (Negative/Negative)

Then there's something outside of the animal kingdom which came to mind. The Scab, or a strike breaker. Scabs are labourers who come in to work in a circumstance when organized labour (usually a union) is participating in a work stoppage. Scabs are usually people who are hired in after a labour dispute starts, and go into work at pretty significant risk to themselves. They are a very distinct NEGATIVE/NEGATIVE class — they risk themselves within the ecosystem because scabs are normally retaliated against, and they usually are negative to the ecosystem in they are deleterious to improving labour relations. The only beneficiary is usually the management class, though even that is often temporary.

You could frame up the scab in invasive species terms in the most negative way: one that comes in, clears out an existing ecosystem, and then dies itself in the process. But more realistically, that relationship results in the species adapting to that environment and the constituent members of the ecosystem adapting in turn. The Cane Toad's introduction to Australia is an example of this.

Scabs in the product world are a pervasive venture capital practice. Take Uber and Lyft. Their core strategies were to undercut existing services in any local they entered into, kill those businesses and acclimate users to their service model, and then hike up their own prices. This has been joking referred to as the Millennial lifestyle subsidy , but its directly responsible for a lot of the big-tech capture of industries that we're experiencing now. Everything is a subscription, we own less that is useful, we spend more.

Revisiting the 2x2

Given the framing above, I think this picture ends up being one of gradations.

Let's take the open source ecosystem as a whole: that's one of net-positive mutual good for consumers and the ecosystem. It fosters new product creation, it's good for consumers from a transparency and accessibility standpoint, it encourages new products, etc.

A new product category is almost always positive for consumers given it introduces choice, but it can go two ways from there: waste generation if the product category isn't received, or potentially market generation as new players enter the field (and capture occurs).

SaaS businesses are generally not good for consumers, acting as long-term leeches on personal capital that are incentivized to reduce churn. A healthy SaaS business is self-sustaining in revenue and its ability to generate revenue is based on the value that it creates to the user. An anti-competitive SaaS business locks users in and that value is dissipated — so its ability to exist in an ecosystem isn't contingent on its value creation but its capture of potential resources that competitors might be able to access

Consumer Subsidies (eg. the millennial lifestyle subsidy) from VC-backed corporations seeking market capture are similarly terrible. They start off as positive for consumers (greater services and access, less cost), but this subsidy is directly created to capture a market — clear cutting an ecosystem to prepare it for replacement.

The thing that I found interesting sketching this out is the clear bias in movement towards capture — which ends up being dangerous for the ecosystem and poisonous to consumers. Returning to the Australian Cane Toad example, the Cane Toad was introduced with one purposes and ended up being an utter blight on the native wildlife as it tried to consume this new animal and ended up dead as a result.

Scott Fitzgerald's Seeing Like a State is a favourite book of mine for its description of how our "ecosystem eyes" are fundamentally lacking when it comes to making structural decisions within a system relative to that system's capacity for emergence. Trying to force legibility on top of an ecosystem often doesn't work because so many of the interactions within a system are contingent.

Making this little parasitic 2x2 was a helpful activity to frame up SOME of those interactions, and while I mapped the "species A" and "species B" onto Ecosystem +/- vs. Consumer +/-, this frame on modeling interactions between symbionts and scabs seems a useful tool for approaching ones own work.

Ultimately, what do we want to make, and how do we want it to affect the ecosystem we inhabit? We might not have ultimate control over the outcomes of our designs, but we can map out the potential interactions between our creations and the environment, and make decisions accordingly.