I absolutely hate, hate, HATE how software environments are often called "ecosystems".
An ecosystem is a living organic structure on a living planet (more specifically, Earth, since we haven't found any other living planets yet), made from all kinds of organisms -- bacteria, archaea, fungi, all kinds of arthropods from tiny mites to big beetles and bumblebees, and far too few vertebrates nowadays because of the fucking Industrial Age. We've been ruining ecosystems at high speed ever since Columbus kickstarted colonialism, but then the steam engine came, constantly accelerating the growth our cancer of an economy, and after WW2 we started the afterburner. We've been destroying ecosystems at supersonic speed for eight decades, we can see them fall apart before our eyes. People have been seing the living world around them getting killed since the dirty old mills of the Black Country, and since the 1960s, a growing green movement all over the planet has been trying to stop the madness. And we aren't really very good at it, are we? This entire mess of a civilisation is running out of control, collapse has probably already begun, we're in ecological overshoot like Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair. Capitalism won't last much longer because it becomes dysfunctional when there isn't any real growth left, and we have not only reached the global growth limits, we have exceeded them, which means that the economy will eventually shrink by more than half, which isn't a recession or even a Second Great Depression, it is an utter collapse of the economy. If those of us who survive that can somehow built a sustainable type of economy from the leftovers, this industrial civilisation might not collapse completely just yet, entering a time of slow decline instead, and an entire new civilisation might grow in some other parts of the world, maybe in Africa, maybe in Asia, and spread across the world as the European type of civilisation slowly vanishes. Who knows? Right now, we need to learn how to survive in times of collapse. And the best way to do so is to learn how to do things properly which will still be relevant when there are no more computers or big factories or giant office buildings.
I am part of an ecosystem, as I am one of many, many animals who live in this landscape. And like other animals, I need to eat some of the organisms who live here in order to survive. I'm a huge threat to every individual potato or chicken, yet my presence leads to the presence of more potatoes and chickens, which is one of all my interactions with the ecosystem. I can't do anything without my actions having consequences for the ecosystem of which I am but a tiny part. Some people today are as afraid of the ongoing global climate catastrophe as they should be, but only very few realise that the biodiversity crisis aka the Sixth Extinction is far worse and far more frightening.
And some IT guys who know fucking zilch about ecology have the bloody audacity to call some software environment an "ecosystem". I find it very annoying. Fucking techbros should think more and talk less.
#biodiversitycrisis #extinction #sixthextinction #globalwarming #climatecrisis #biospheredecline #capitalism #economicgrowth #limitstogrowth #overshoot #collapse #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #ecosystem
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