Digital ecosystem: The journey of a metaphor

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, governance and environmental policy. The origins of the concept as a form of circuitry applied to nature are outlined as a background against which to trace its role as a socio-technical metaphor for digital capitalism. Since the 1990s, various formulations of “ecosystem” have offered a naturalistic interpretation to phenomena ranging from economic interactions to digital infrastructure and the urban everyday. I conclude that by representing the internet and the market as complex, self-organizing processes, the metaphor prioritizes the imperative of adapting to—and downplays the possibility of challenging—our erratic digital capitalism. The article contributes by illuminating the ideological work of 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.