Ecosystems vs. Artifacts: Don’t Break the Web

Here’s Gordon Brander in an article titled “Don't fork the ecosystem”:

Most of our software has been shaped by chance decisions made in haste by people who could not have predicted how the system would end up being used today.

And if we could rebuild those systems today, knowing what we know now, we’d invent a whole new class of problems for ourselves twenty years from now.

Software can be rebuilt, because software is a machine. But a software ecosystem is not a machine. It is a living system. When we attempt to rebuild the ecosystem, we’re making a category error. We confuse the software for the ecological process unfolding around it.

Seems akin to hiring and firing. People are not cogs in a machine. Team dynamics are disrupted when people leave, as an ecosystem is being tampered with.

When I was a kid, I did not understand why we couldn’t “just” go back to the moon. We’d already done it once before. So if we’d done it before, can’t we just do it again? I thought of it like riding a bicycle: once you know how to do it, can’t you just do it again whenever you want?

Only as I grew older did I come to understand that an entire ecosystem of people, processes, tools, organizations, experience, storehouses of knowledge, and more made it possible to go to the moon. And you can’t just turn that back on with the flip of a switch.

I was confusing the artifact (a human being on the moon) for the ecosystem that made it possible (NASA, contractors, government officials, technology, etc.)

Carrying forward old baggage offends our sense of aesthetics, but hey, that’s how evolved systems work. Chickens still carry around the gene for dinosaur teeth. This is because a living system must be viable at every evolutionary stage. It can never pause, reset, or make a breaking change. The path of evolution is always through the adjacent possible.

Lesson: the web isn’t an artifact. It’s an ecosystem. Don’t break the web.