The Paintskin Squeeze

A friend who owns a New York City apartment told me that he’s only responsible for maintenance “from the paint in.” I feel like the paint, squeezed between the physical and mental forces inside my body, and the social and physical forces outside.

Evangelion mechaphors

I watched the first Evangelion movie over the weekend. It tells of humans using giant robots (aka mechas; they’re called Evangelions, or Evas for short) to battle mysterious giant alien entities called Angels. Teenage children are needed to pilot the mechas. This symbiosis reminded me of being old, and corporations.

Frankenstein at the FCC

A full-text search for “Frankenstein” on ECFS (the repository for official records in the FCC's docketed proceedings from 1992 to the present) on 22 Feb 2020 returned 91 results. I was surprised the number was that small.

Fertilility myths in high tech

I was very taken by Derek Thompson's "Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity" in the November 2017 issue of The Atlantic. I was inspired to scan it for metaphors, which are documented in a doc shared here. I was especially struck by the prevalence of fertility metaphors; keywords include seeds, harvest, drought, fruit, reap, and gestation.

Spectrum is not a scarce natural resource

Almost every policy or technology story about radios starts with the litany that Spectrum is a Scarce Natural Resource. I will argue that this claim is false, and that it matters.

In short:

• Spectrum is no more a scarce natural resource than sound.
• It is more accurate and productive to talk about radio operation.
• Rather than saying “spectrum is scarce”, it’s better to say “radio coexistence is hard.”

The pay-off is that this alternative language makes us focus on what matters – the best way to arrange the operation of radios – rather than on ways to manage a resource (spectrum) that may or may exist.

Fitting square pegs into bicycles

To this non-lawyer, jurisprudence often seems to be metaphor mongering/mangling/wrangling -- as in Judge Easterbrook's contention that that there was no more a “law of cyberspace” than there was a “Law of the Horse" ("Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse" (1996); see also Larry Lessig's "The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach").

From a recent CS Monitor comes the latest in this inexhaustible genre: "Is bitcoin money? Are Airbnbs hotels? Why courts have trouble deciding."

DoD treats Spectrum as Territory

The U.S. Department of Defense released a spectrum strategy document on Thursday (press release, pdf). I’ll leave discerning what (if anything) is actually new in it to the Pentagon watchers.

I was struck by the implications of the language used: the DoD conceives of spectrum as a place. Given that military success often seems to be framed as controlling or denying territory, this is not an auspicious starting point for spectrum sharing – which is about wireless system coexistence in many intangible dimensions, rather than all-or-nothing control of territory.

Receiver Interference Tolerance: The Tent Analogy

A postcript to my testimony (see previous post) at the House sub-committee on Communications and Technology hearing on receivers: It sounded like Rep. Walden, who chairs the sub-committee, hoped my oral presentation would've mentioned the tent analogy I included in the written testimony. So since at least one person liked it, here it is:

Three meanings of "spectrum efficiency"

“Efficiency” is a word of power, chanted when someone wants to bewitch an audience with the potency of economics. It’s often used in wireless policy, and I’ve realized that even when “spectrum efficiency” isn’t purely a fetish and is used to refer a ratio of input divided by output, the amounts compared depend on whether the speaker is an engineer or economist.

Receiver protection limits: Two Analogies

I argued in Receiver protection limits that there are better ways to manage poor receivers causing cross-channel interference problems than specifying receiver standards. Here are two analogies to sharpen one’s intuition for the most appropriate way to handle such situations.

Cities increase the salinity of rivers running through them, affecting downstream agriculture. However, the choices that farmers make determine the degree of harm; some crops are much more salt-tolerant than others. In order to ensure that farms bear their part of the burden, regulators have a choice: they can either regulate which crops may be grown downstream, or they can specify a ceiling on the salinity of the water leaving the city limits, leaving it up to farmers to decide whether to plant salt-tolerant crops, perform desalination, or move their business elsewhere. Limits on salinity protection are a less interventionist solution, and don’t require regulators to have a deep understanding of the interaction between salinity, crops and local geography.

Sound pollution is another analogy to radio operation. Let’s imagine that the state has an interest in the noise levels inside houses near a freeway. It can either provide detailed regulations prescribing building set-backs and comprehensive specifications on how houses should be sound-proofed, or it could ensure that the noise level at the freeway-residential boundary won’t exceed a certain limit, leaving it up to home-owners to decide where and how to build. Again, noise ceilings are a simple and generic regulatory approach that does not limit the freedom of citizens to live as they choose, and that does not require the regulator to keep pace with ever-evolving technologies to sound-proof buildings.

Not even a metaphor

Said Industry Minister Eric Besson, describing an upcoming auction of radio licenses in France, "These frequencies are of very, very high quality." What? How can a frequency, merely an attribute of electromagnetic radiation, be of high quality?

I’ve been inveighing against the misuse of spectrum metaphors for some time, but it took this quote to make me realize that the figure of speech at issue is really metonymy, not metaphor.

Metonymy is referring to something not by its name, but by something that is intimately associated with it (Wikipedia). Some examples:

The designers come up with the ideas, but the suits (worn by executives) make the big bonuses.

The pen (associated with thoughts written down) is mightier than the sword (associated with military action).

Freedom of the press (associated with the journalists and what they write) is an important value.

The White House (associated with the President and his staff) stood above the fray.

He bought the best acres (associated with the land measured in acres).

Both metaphor and metonymy substitute one term for another: metaphor by some specific similarity, and metonymy by some association. In spectrum language both are at work, for example in “Guard bands leave too many frequencies (or spectrum) lying fallow.”

Metonymy: Frequencies are associated with radio licenses

Metaphor: Radio licenses are like title to property

Metonymy: Property title is associated with the land to which it relates

Metaphor: Fallow land stands for any underused asset

Who gets the apple?

I’ve been looking for a metaphor to illustrate the weaknesses I see in the FCC’s “you two just go off and coordinate” approach to solving wireless interference problems among operators.

Let's think of the responsibility to bear the cost of harmful interference as an apple.*  It’s as if the FCC says to Alice and Bob, “I've got an apple, and it belongs to one of you. I’m not going to decide which of you should have the apple; you decide among yourselves.”

Now, if Alice were the owner of the apple and valued it at 80 cents, then the answer would simply depend on how much Bob valued having the apple (and rational negotiation, of course). If having an apple was worth 90 cents to him, he’d get it for some price between 80 and 90 cents; if it was worth only 60 cents to him, Alice would keep it. Problem solved.

Trouble is, the FCC doesn’t tell them who actually owns the apple, and even if it did, it doesn’t tell them whether it’s a Granny Smith or a Gala. The odds of Alice and Bob coming to an agreement without going back to the FCC is slim.

The analogy: The FCC’s rules often don’t make clear who’s responsible, in the end, for solving a mutual interference problem (i.e. who owns the apple); and it’s impossible to know short of a rule making by the FCC what amounts to harm (i.e. what kind of apple it is).

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* There's always interference between two nearby radio operators (near in geography or frequency).  While the blame is usually laid on the transmitter operator, it can just as reasonably be placed on the receiver operator for not buying better equipment that could reject the interference.

A music/governance metaphor

I’m still struggling to find a usable taxonomy for “new methods of governance” for the internet. A conversation with Grisha Krivchenia, a music teacher, prompted this attempt at analogy. Since my knowledge of music and its history is sketchy, any corrective comments would be gratefully received.

Let’s start with a particular musical tradition: harpsichord pieces in the High Baroque. Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations, for example, with a particular instrument and even performer (Goldberg) in mind. The performer has many options, however, regarding tempo and mood. When the same score is played on a different instrument, e.g. the piano, an additional set of choices and opportunities arise.

Same score, different instrument(s)

A score written for one instrument can be played by another one with no change; for example, one can play a flute piece on the oboe. However, figurations that were easy for the intended instrument may be hard for the new one. Some instrument changes require transpositions of notes to a new key, for example playing the flute piece on a clarinet (pitched in C and B-flat, respectively). Even if the notes are the same, the music will be different.

As an example of the music/governance metaphor in action, consider libel. The same laws of defamation apply to web pages just as much as to a paper pamphlet; however, some additional interpretation is required from the judge when applying statute and common law developed for paper to the internet.

A slightly more extensive change comes about when music scored for one ensemble (e.g. strings) is re-arranged for another (woodwinds). Both the individual and blended characters of the instruments differ, and the character of the piece can change quite markedly. A possible analogy is the application 911 requirements for phone access to emergency services to Voice over IP devices. The desired policy result and the requirements in law are the same, but the implementation may have to be different. For example, “911” is actually an area code rather than a phone number, and its implementation in VoIP was debated. Further, 911 calls are delivered to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) determined by the location of the caller – which may not be easy to determine for an internet device.

Once the piano exists, it enables new forms of music. First, performers can radically rethink a piece: Glenn Gould’s Goldbergs, to cite a late example. Second, composers wrote pieces for the piano in ways that were inconceivable in the age of the harpsichord: Liszt and Chopin. An analogy in regulation might be the way in which the Kodak camera prompted the overhaul (or arguably invention) of privacy law. [1] Another one might be the way in which the internet if forcing a rethinking of common carriage rules as they apply to telecommunications carriers. [2]

New compositions, same instruments

However, new approaches to composition can come about without new instruments – the shift to atonal music (i.e. lacking a central key) associated with Berg, Schoenberg and Webern supposedly arose from the “crisis of tonality” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century . An analogy in communications policy might be the emergence of exclusive-use radio licenses allocated by auctions in wireless regulation: they were prompted by insights from economics (e.g. Coase and the privatization movement more generally) rather than by changes in technology.

New performances

Music can also change purely as a result of changes in performance practice. An unattributed assertion in Wikipedia states that “changes in performance practice made by prominent musicians often reverberated in the playing of many other musicians.” Other candidates for this phenomenon is the use of bel canto in early 20th century opera, the use of a clear declamatory vocal style in the French operatic tradition, and the dramatic increases in the minimum technical accuracy required of performers of classical music. One can see this effect in governance too, particularly where common-law is used; interpretations and precedent are cumulative. An ongoing example is software patents: legal scholar Mark Lemley stated at a Silicon Flatirons conference in March 2009 that over the last three years, courts have fixed most of the problems that have been grist for the software patent debate. I presume there are also fashions in jurisprudence, just as there are in music – but here again my lack of knowledge fails me…

A change in venue also makes a difference. The Wikipedia article on the history of the orchestra suggests that the 18th century change from civic music making where the composer had some degree of time or control, to smaller court music making and one-off performance, placed a premium on music that was easy to learn, often with little or no rehearsal. The results were changes in musical style from the counterpoint of the baroque period to the classical style, and emphasis on new techniques such as notated dynamics and phrasing. I believe that the shift in the stakeholder landscape in telecoms from an insider’s club of a few, large firms and regulators to a global plethora of companies and regulators of all sizes is in the process of changing governance, but we don’t have the luxury of 200 years to discern the key developments.

Tentative conclusions

The analogy of music to governance is as follows:

• Composer – policy maker (legislator or regulator with quasi-legislative powers, like the FCC)
• Score – law, rule or regulation
• Instrument – technology and social context
• Performer – judge (or quasi-judicial actor, e.g. the FCC)
• Audience – interest groups, stakeholders, citizens, etc.

Discerning the metaphor mapping for governance itself is harder – though no harder than I find understanding what “governance” means, period… Perhaps they’re both just the “meta”: music is the aggregate of all the actors and activities related to making music, and the same for governance. The useful insight for me is that all the elements – composer, score, etc. – are necessary to make music, and likewise for governance. Any focus just on policy makers, or just on regulations, or just on the courts etc. will understate the problem.

In terms of new kinds of music/governance, we see

1. Changes of instruments (technology) that require only minor changes in the score (law)
2. Changes that prompt composers (policy makers) to invent new genres (rules), either as a result of new technologies or the internal development of the genre itself
3. Changes brought about by shifts in performance (judicial) practice

The performers (judges) plays an important creative role; they can change the import of a score (law) by their interpretation in the context of a new instrument (technology). It may be that judges are most influential when the policy makers have not yet caught up with changes in technology – they are making music on new instruments using the old scores.

This short taxonomy focuses on the upstream part of the performance value chain. New kinds of music arise most visibly from new compositions and/or new instruments, but performance and audience play roles in disseminating and validating them. Likewise, new forms of governance need to be enacted by courts and accepted by stakeholders before taking hold; new technology and new law are only part of the picture.

Update 12/28/2009: See the comments for some great thoughts from Jon Sallet about the role of improvisation in music and governance. His conclusion: "In a world of change and uncertainty, discretion is an important tool; discretion that is applied by professionals (like trained musicians), within guidelines (like the old rule against using augmented fourths) but that calls upon the expertise of the composer and the performer both to work, as it were, in harmony."

Footnotes

[1] Robert E. Mensel, ""Kodakers Lying in Wait": Amateur Photography and the Right of Privacy in New York 1885-1915", American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 24-45, PDF available.

[2] James V DeLong, “Avoiding a Tech Train Wreck”, The American, May/June 2008

Constructing spectrum – lessons from the history of economics

“Spectrum” is powerful construct; most people assume such a thing exists, and this assumption has regulatory consequences. But how did it come into being? The stories that some social scientists tell about the construction of “the economy” by economics provide some insight.

Timothy Mitchell, for example, argues that the economy was created by economists:

The economy is a recent product of socio-technical practice, including the practice of academic economics. Previously, the term “economy” referred to ways of managing resources and exercising power. In the mid-twentieth century, it became an object of power and knowledge. Rival metrological projects brought the economy into being. [1]

In his chapter in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Michel Callon puts it this way: “To claim that economics is performative is to argue that it does things, rather than simply describing (with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy) an external reality that is not affected by economics.” MacKenzie argues in his chapter of the same book that the Black-Scholes-Merton options pricing model not only helped traders price something that already existed; it also shaped it, since most traders ended up using the model, prices converged to what the model predicted. [2]

In the same way, economists who treat spectrum as an asset (see my post "Property rights without assets") are not simply describing an external reality; they are bringing something into being. One of the key tools in this process is metrology: for example, the gathering of GDP data brings into being “the economy” which is reified through numbers like the GDP. In the same way, the program to make an inventory of spectrum buttresses the spectrum-is-real perspective. (More on spectrum inventories in a future post.)

Implications

World views have consequences, and thus stakeholders. Those who have a stake in the existing spectrum-based regime gain from this view; questioning the validity of “spectrum” undermines the security of their rights and privileges. This applies not only to capitalists who own spectrum licenses, but also to progressives who base their claims to government supervision of radios on the public ownership of the supposed “spectrum asset”. On the other hand, if one thinks of radio regulation simply in terms of the operating rights associated with radios, then a much more dynamic regime can be imagined – one that would benefit both political and commercial entrepreneurs. A non-spectrum world view might also be attractive to current “spectrum owners” who are discontented with their rights. [3]

The political and engineering systems that have co-evolved with the spectrum concept have specific characteristics: largely static allocations of rights to operate defined in terms of fixed frequency ranges. More dynamic approaches don’t fit nicely. For example, Preston Marshall wants to guarantee the right to operate, but not exclusivity over one channel; he proposes to guarantee a licensee (along with others) an aggregate of access to sufficient frequencies to meet a certain amount of service. [4]

This is an approach that focuses on behavior, rather than the exclusive ownership of an asset. As I argued in "Property rights without assets", this is perfectly compatible with a property rights regime, since property rights don’t have to be based on an underlying asset.

The bottom line is that a spectrum-as-asset approach leads one to ignore elements, which leads to inferior rights design. Specifically, receivers have been ignored. If one thinks one’s job is to "carve up spectrum", then you don't have to worry about receivers. But when radio is considered as a system, the receivers determine interference just as much as transmitters, so one has to take them into account explicitly. By analogy: if you're deciding a land trespass case, you don't worry about whether farmer is grazing Holsteins or Friesians. But if you're deciding a trademark dispute, everything depends on what happens in the mind of the consumer (analogous to the receiver). [5]

Footnotes

[1] Mitchell, Timothy (2008) “Rethinking Economy”, Geoforum, Volume 39, Issue 3, May 2008, pp. 1116-1121.

[2] MacKenzie, Donald A, Fabian Muniesa, Lucia Siu (2007), Do economists make markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Princeton University Press, 2007

[3] There is debate about the origin and extent of government property rights in spectrum; see for example the Introduction of William L. Fishman, “Property Rights, Reliance, and Retroactivity Under the Communications Act of 1934”, Federal Communications Law Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1. Fishman concludes: “It would probably be better, therefore, to say that the government regulates electromagnetic radiation in certain defined frequencies, rather than to say it regulates spectrum.”

[4] See e.g. Section 5.4 in the report “Radio Regulation Summit: Defining Inter-channel Operating Rules”.

[5] For more on the virtues of the radio-as-trademark metaphor, see my blog post “De-situating Spectrum: Non-spatial metaphors for wireless communication”, and paper “De-Situating Spectrum: Rethinking Radio Policy Using Non-Spatial Metaphors”

Ecosystems: sustainability or innovation, pick one (at a time)

Business folk, particularly those in IT, love the ecosystem metaphor (perhaps erroneously). One of the reasons, I realized listening to Pamela Passman on a panel at the Silicon Flatirons annual conference, is that it provides validation to both incumbents and challengers. Passman advocated creating a healthy internet ecosystem, and emphasized the importance of both sustainability and innovation. [*]

Both of these are characteristics of ecosystems, but not, as I understand it, at the same time. For example, mammals could only start rise after the extinction of the dinosaurs, prompted by a massive meteor strike or large-scale volcanism. The innovation that led to Homo Sapiens resulted from a catastrophic breakdown in ecosystem sustainability.

The adaptive cycle model developed by Buzz Holling and his collaborators has ecosystems constantly cycling through four stages: exploitation or growth, a mature conservation phase, a catastrophic release, and finally reorganization leading to new growth. To take the example of a forest: a fire, drought, or insect infestation triggers the breakdown (release) of the intricate and productive biological web that had been established during the preceding conservation phase. This sets the stage for reorganization, during which species that had been excluded in the prior conservation phase move in. As they become established, exploitation of open niches leads to growth. Eventually, we reach another conservation phase. Everything settles down; all the niches become filled, and the network of connections between biomass and nutrients becomes increasingly tight. This is a stable and very productive stage, from the point of view of resource utilization and biomass production. However, the tight linkages make it fragile to sudden release, starting the cycle again.

Ecosystems therefore oscillate between stability and innovation, swinging through repeated crises. By focusing on the appropriate phase, both incumbents and newcomers can see themselves in an ecosystem view. During an exploitation/growth phase, which we have with the Internet at the moment, newcomers are validated by looking back to the preceding reorganization phase which led to their rise, and (re-)emerging incumbents look forward to the impending conservation phase during which they will reap their reward.

What does sustainability mean in this context? Certainly not eternal stability, since that’s not possible. At best, it’s management the ecosystem to limit the severity of the release phases while still generating enough restructuring to allow innovation.

The moral of this story is that ecosystems talk hides but does not end the endless tussle between newcomers and incumbents. Wise governance needs to find a way to extract the social benefits of both, while recognizing that each represents the eclipse of the other.

Note

[*] Shane Greenstein had a great paper at the conference on what makes for "healthy" behavior in the internet industry; forthcoming in the Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law. For a brief summary, see Rocky Radar

De-situating Spectrum: Non-spatial metaphors for wireless communication

Today’s spectrum policy debate is conducted in terms of a pervasive metaphor: that spectrum is spatial, signals are phenomena in space, and radios are agents (see my DYSPAN 2007 paper “Imagining Radio: Mental Models of Wireless Communication”, PDF).

Metaphors are not right or wrong, but a dominant metaphor can forestall new insights. Any metaphor highlights some aspects of the situation it is explaining, and suppresses others. We are so used to thinking about spectrum in spatial terms that the metaphor’s disadvantages have become invisible, and alternatives to it are barely thinkable. Spectrum allocation is imagined in terms of property rights in real estate, and cognitive radios are conceived of as smart agents acting within delimited, space-like frequency domains. Alternative metaphors can stimulate new approaches for policy making and research by de-familiarizing wireless communications.

It is useful for a new metaphor to have some overlaps with existing ways of thinking. An entirely different conceptual structure that shares no referents or mappings with the dominant view – like the “wireless communications are like the Internet” metaphor proposed by Open Spectrum advocates – will be so alien that it has trouble getting traction. This paper therefore explores conceptual models for wireless communication that have similar concept-to-concept mappings as the spectrum-as-space analogy, but that do not rely on a spatial metaphor.

One possible alternative metaphor is to imagine spectrum to be like all the crafts practiced in a medieval city. A spectrum license is like the letters patent that give a particular guild a monopoly in their respective crafts. The spectrum licensee is the guild. License-exempt spectrum is that set of trade activities that do not require letters patent. A spectrum part corresponds to a specific craft. Signals are like the practice of the craft. Radios are like craftspeople and their customers. The regulator corresponds to the King or city burgesses who issue charters.

One can model different types of allocation as different terms on the business practice monopoly that is issued to a craft guild. Command-and-control spectrum allocation would be analogous to the state not only issuing a charter to (say) the weavers’ guild to make textiles, but also specifying the kinds of fabric they may make, and the prices they can charge. They need the Crown’s permission to change any of the parameters, and weavers have to stay weavers. The analogy of transferable, flexible-use allocation would be that weavers still need letters patent to practice their craft, but can make any kind of fabric they like, charge any price, and can sell on their practice to anyone they wish.

In short, this is a “spectrum-as-business-practices” model. Other non-spatial metaphors include spectrum-as-intellectual-property-rights, and spectrum-as-markets (as distinct from markets in spectrum).

A new metaphor highlights hidden assumptions in the dominant conceptual model by emphasizing and downplaying issues differently. For example, the spectrum-as-business-practices analogy blurs the distinction between the craft of a weaver and the act of making and selling textiles; that is, the distinction between spectrum and signal is played down. By comparison, the dominant spectrum-as-space metaphor emphasizes that spectrum exists independently from signals, which are “added” to the space. It implies that one can clearly separate the underlying asset (spectrum) from what you do with it (the signals), just as land is distinct from the buildings on it. The business practices metaphor therefore calls into question the meaning of the term “spectrum resource”, and the entire project of maximizing the utility of a nation’s spectrum resources, since spectrum is not an asset independent of use.

The spectrum-as-business-practices metaphor also stresses that the primary regulatory consideration is permission to perform a set of behaviors within certain constraints; the use of a resource, which is primary in the spectrum-as-land conception, is downplayed. A business license is a set of rules of permitted behavior, rather than use-neutral title to an asset conceived as a space-like frequency interval. It therefore invites a formulation of wireless communication policy purely in terms of signals and radios, with no privileging of frequency above other operational parameters.

Through these and other comparisons, non-spatial metaphors for wireless communications mark out an alternative conceptual model for spectrum policy and cognitive radio research that can lead to new solutions.

Programs as spaces

Paul Graham's essay Holding a Program in One’s Head describes how a good programmer immersed in their code holds it in their mind: "[Mathematicians] try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will."

The article’s mainly concerned with the organizational consequences of needing to "load the program into your head” in order to do good work. But I want to focus on the spatial metaphor. Thinking through a program by walking through the spaces in your head is an image I've heard other programmers use, and it reminds me of the memory methods described by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory. (While Graham does make reference to writing and reading, I don't think this is aural memory; his references to visualization seem more fundamental.)

I wonder about the kind of cognitive access a programmer has to their program once it’s loaded. Descriptions of walking through a building imply that moment-by-moment the programmer is only dealing with a subset of the problem, although the whole thing is readily available in long-term memory. He’s thinking about the contents of a particular room and how it connects with the other rooms, not conceptualizing the entire house and all its relationships at the same instant. I imagine this is necessarily the case, since short-term memory is limited. If true, this imposes limitation on the topology of the program, since the connections between different parts are localized and factorizable – when you walk out of the bedroom you don’t immediately find yourself in the foyer. Consequently, problems that can’t be broken down (or haven’t been broken down) into pieces with local interactions of sufficiently limited scope to be contained in short term memory will not be soluble.

Graham also has a great insight on what makes programming special: "One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that's what programs are: ideas." Not only are programming tasks not like fighting wars as Graham imagines them; they're not like manufacturing widgets either. The non-parallelizability of ideas implies their interconnections, and here we have the fundamental tension: ideas may be highly interlaced by their nature, but the nature of the brain limits the degree to which we can cope with their complexity.

Business: a City, not an Ecosystem

Geoffrey West’s work on scaling in cities provides ammunition for my critique of the “business ecosystem” analogy (Ecosystem alert, Eco mumbo jumbo). New Scientist reports on a recent paper by West and co-workers which found that some urbanization processes differ dramatically from biological ones (references below).

Describing the city as an organism is a much-loved metaphor; New Scientist quotes Frank Lloyd Wright waxing lyrical about “thousands of acres of cellular tissue . . . enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries.”

We like to think that cities work like biological entities, just as we like to think that industries work like networks of organisms. But West & Co’s work indicates that the analogy is flawed. As animals get larger, their metabolism slows down. This is true in some respects for cities, but in others the opposite is true. Infrastructure metrics, like the numbers of gas stations and miles of paved roads scale like biological ones: the amount grows less slowly than the size of the city. But for the things that really count, things speed up. For example, measures of wealth creation and innovation - the number of patents, total wages, GDP - grow more rapidly with size. Bigger cities have a faster metabolism than smaller ones, unlike animals.

Industries resemble cities more than they resemble ecosystems. Increasing returns with size and non-zero sums are key characteristics that are found in both cities and industries, but not biological systems. “Business is Urbanism” is a more accurate and productive metaphor than “Business is an Ecosystem”.

P.S. While we’re talking about ecosystems... The very notion of ecosystem is, of course, itself a metaphor: Nature is a System. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a system as “A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.” It is presumed that there is an observable whole; that it can be broken down into elements; and that the elements interact. So when people use the Business is an Ecosystem metaphor, I think what they’re really doing is simply using Business is a System, and cloaking it with the numinous mantle of Nature (cf. Ecosystem alert).

References

Dana Mackenzie, Ideas: the lifeblood of cities, New Scientist, 23 May 2007 (subscription wall)

Bettencourt, Lobo, Helbing, Kuhnert & West, Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 104, p 7301, 24 April 2007

Ecosystem alert

When you see references to ecosystems in a business story, raise the shields. Someone is trying to mess with your mind.

The current Business Week has two good examples. An adulatory story about the "Apple ecosystem" (Welcome to Planet Apple, which ran as Welcome to Apple World in hard copy) describes how the company has built its network of partners. Implicit is Iansiti and Levien's notion that the most influential companies are "keystone species in an ecosystem." As I argued in Eco mumbo jumbo, the analogy is flawed in a long list of ways. For example: species don't choose to be keystones; companies interact vountarily, but one organism consumes another against its will; and biological systems have neither goals nor external regulators, whereas industries have both.

The ecosystem analogy is used unthinkingly in this story, judging by the hodgpodge of other metaphors that are used: "[the] ecosystem has morphed from a sad little high-tech shtetl into a global empire," "[its] new flock of partners," "a gated, elitist community," "the insular world of the Mac," "the Apple orchard . . . is still no Eden." Note, though, that most of them refer to places, with a nod to nature.

To get a sense of what's really going on when the ecosystem metaphor is used, let's look at another story, Look Who's Fighting Patent Reform. Computing companies have been pushing for patent reform on Capitol Hill, but "[t]he past few weeks have brought an unexpected surge of opposition from what one lobbyist calls the 'innovation ecosystem'—a sprawling network of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, trade groups, drug and medical equipment manufacturers, engineering societies, and research universities." It's a term used by the special pleader. The only substantive resemblance to an ecosystem is that these groups connect to each other in network. The rhetorical benefit, though, is to invoke the commonplace Nature Is Good. Nature is unspoiled, bountiful, self-regulating: the antithesis of concrete-covered recklessly-regulating partisan politicking. Nature is a metaphor that appeals to both sides of the political divide: it's organic, but competitive; it's an inter-related, but dynamic; it's nurturing, but stern in its consequences. It's therefore ideal when trying to put a halo around an otherwise unsympathetic subject.

Eco mumbo jumbo

I’m coming to the conclusion that the “business ecosystem” metaphor is nonsense. That’s a pity, since I speculated in Tweaking the Web Metaphor that the food web might be a useful metaphor for the internet, conceived as a “module ecosystem.” [1] Bugs in the business ecosystem mapping would be even more unfortunate for people who’ve made strategic business decisions on the basis of this flawed metaphor.

“Business is an ecosystem” is an analogy, and like any argument from analogy it is valid to the extent that the essential similarities of the two concepts are greater than the essential differences. I will try to show (at too much length for a blog post, I know...) that the differences are much greater than the similarities.

This biological analogy is very popular. A Google search on "business ecosystem" yielded about 154,000 hits, "software ecosystem" gave 76,000 hits (Microsoft’s in 47,200 of them), and “computing ecosystem” 18,000 hits.

So where’s the problem?

Let me count the ways.

1. A biological ecosystem is analyzed in terms of species, each of which represents thousands or millions of organisms. Business ecosystems are described in terms of firms: just one of each. A food web of species summarizes billions of interactions among interactions; a business web of companies is simply the interaction among the firms studied.

2. Species are connected, primarily, by flows of energy and nutrients. A is eaten by B is eaten by C is eaten by D, etc. Energy is lost as heat at every step. In the business system, a link primarily represents company B buying something from company A. Goods flow from A to B, and money flows back. Both A and B gain, otherwise they wouldn’t’ve entered into the transaction. Therefore, the system isn’t lossy, as it is in a food web. In fact, gains from trade suggest that specialization leading to more interacting firms leads to more value. The links between companies could also stand for co-marketing ventures relationships, technology sharing and licensing agreements, collusion, cross shareholding, etc; however, these have the same non-zero sum characteristics as monetary exchange does.

3. One might sidestep these problems by claiming that species are mapped to firms, and individual animals are mapped to the products that a firm sells. That solves the multiplicity mismatch in #1, and, if one just considers the material content of products, the entropy problem in #2. However, two problems remain. First, the value of products is mostly in the knowledge they embody, not their matter; knowledge (aka value add) is created at every step, the inverse of what happens with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Second, companies sell many diverse products. The fudge only works if a species is mapped to a product unit (in fact, to the part of a product unit that produces a single SKU), rather than to a firm.

4. Species change slowly, and their role in an ecosystem changes very slowly; on the other hand, companies can change their role in the blink of an eye through merger, acquisition or divestiture. Interactions between firms can be changed by contract, whereas that between species is not negotiable except perhaps over very long time scales by evolution of defensive strategies).

5. Biological systems are unstable; the driving force of ecological succession is catastrophe. [2] Businesses seek stability, and the biological metaphor is used as a source of techniques to increase resilience; see e.g. Iansiti and Levien’s claim that keystone species lead to increase stability in an ecosystem. [3], [4] If one seeks stability, biological systems are not a good place to look.

6. Biological systems don’t have goals, but human ones do. There are no regulatory systems external to ecosystems, but many, such as rule of law and anti-trust, in human markets. Natural processes don’t care about equity or justice, but societies do, and impose them on business systems. If ecosystems were a good model for business networks, there would be no need for anti-trust in markets.

7. End-consumers are not represented at all in the “business ecosystem” model. Von Hippel and others [5] who study collaborative innovation could be seen to be pointing to customers - or at least some of them - as a node in the business ecosystem, but the same problems about singularity/multiplicity noted above applies here.

8. Companies are exhorted to invest in their ecosystem if they want to keystone species. Keystone species don’t necessarily (or usually) represent a lot of biomass, so it’s not clear why a firm would want to be a keystone. (And of course, the metaphor leaves unstated whether biomass maps to total revenue, profitability, return on investment, or something else.) More generally: being a keystone species isn’t a matter of choice for the animal concerned; the keystone relationship arises from the interactions among species as a matter of course.

The business ecosystem metaphor in use

Iansiti and Levien are high profile proponents of business ecosystems. [3] [4] In The Keystone Advantage, they motivate the analogy between business networks and biological ecosystems by arguing that both are “formed by large, loosely connected networks of entities”, both “interact with each other in complex ways”, and that “[f]irms and species are therefore simultaneously influenced by their internal capabilities and by their complex interactions with the rest of the ecosystem.” They state that the key analogy they draw “is between the characteristic behavior of a species in an ecosystem and the operating strategy of a strategic business unit.” They declare the stakes when they continue: “To the extent that the comparison of business units to ecosystems [I presume they mean “to species”] is a valid one, it suggests that some of the lessons from biological networks can fruitfully be applied to business networks.”

To caricature their argument: Ecosystems are networks; business networks are networks; therefore business networks are ecosystems. Hmmm...

They were more circumspect in the papers that preceded the book, where they try to dodge the weakness of the analogy that underpins their argument by contending that they don’t mean it: “[W]e are not arguing here that industries are ecosystems or even that it makes sense to organize them as if they were, but that biological ecosystems serve both as a source of vivid and useful terminology as well as a providing some specific and powerful insights into the different roles played by firms” ([4], footnote 10). They want to have it both ways: get the rhetorical boost of a powerful biological metaphor, but avoid dealing with parts of the mapping that are inaccurate or misleading. As they noted in their book: If industries cannot be compared to ecosystems, then their insights cannot be validated by the analogy. However, they do attempt a mapping. For example, they attempt to answer the question “What makes a healthy business ecosystem?” by examining ecosystem phenomena like (1) hubs which are said to account for the fundamental robustness of nature’s webs, (2) robustness measured by survival rates in a given ecosystem, (3) productivity of an ecosystem analogized to total factor productivity analysis in economics, and (4) niche creation.

In most if not all cases, the appeal to ecosystem is very superficial; no substantive analogy is drawn. For example, Messerschmitt and Szyperski’s book [6], which made it into softcover, is entitled Software Ecosystem, but its remit seems to be simply to examine software “in the context of its users, its developers, its buyers and sellers, its operators, society and government, lawyers, and economics”; the word ecosystem doesn’t even appear in the index. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book.) The word ecosystem is simply meant to evoke a community of interdependent actors, with no reference beyond that to dynamics or behavior.

A more generic flaw with the business ecosystem metaphor is that most people are more familiar with businesses than with ecosystems. Successful metaphors usually explain complex or less-known things in terms of simpler, more familiar ones. Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day? The rhetorical appeal of the business ecosystem analogy must lie beyond its rather weak ability to make domesticate a strange idea.

Why do careful scholars resort to the ecosystem metaphor in spite of its obvious flaws? The image of nature is so powerful that it is a symbol too potent to pass up. Nature represents The Good (at least in our culture at this time), and therefore an appeal to a natural order is a compelling argument if one’s claims bear some resemblance to what’s happening in nature. However, if nothing else, this reminds me of Hegel’s historicist cop-out that what is real is rational, and what is rational is real. Just because nature is constructed in a certain way doesn’t mean that industries should be.

Perhaps my standards for metaphors are too high. To me, a conceptual metaphor is a mapping one set of ideas to another; one has to take the “bad” elements of the mapping with the “good”. If the good outweighs the bad, and if the metaphor produces insight and new ideas, then the analogy has value. Others just take the “good” and simply ignore the “bad”. For me, a metaphor is a take-it-all-or-leave-it set menu, not something to pick from a la carte.

Tentative conclusion

Does this all matter? Yes, but I still have to work out the details. For now I just claim that the weakness of the mapping between biological and business systems means that any argument that one might make about the goodness of “business ecosystems” in general and “keystone species” in particular is potentially misleading. It could delude firms into make unsound investments, e.g. in “building ecosystems,” and lead policy makers into dangerous judgments.

Notes

[1] The module ecosystem differs from the business ecosystem in that species, the nodes of the food web, are mapped to functional modules, rather than to individual companies. However, the glaring weaknesses of the business ecosystem metaphor undermine my confidence in the whole approach.

[2] John Harte, in “Business as a Living System: The Value of Industrial Ecology A Roundtable Discussion,” California Management Review (Spring 2001), argues that the ecological sustainability practices under the banner of “industrial ecology” are worthy and important, but that they do not mimic the way natural ecosystems work. His ideas are reflected in items #2, #5 and #6. He also notes that human processes are much more efficient in using waste heat than natural ones are – photosynthesis is only about a half a percent efficient, whereas power plants at 30% are sixty times more efficient. Note, however, that Industrial ecology, defined as the proposition that industrial systems should be seen as closed-loop ecosystems where wastes of one process become inputs for another process (wikipedia, ISIE) differs from the business ecosystem idea as I treat it here, i.e. that industry organization (regardless of ecological impact) can be understood as an ecosystem.

[3] Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien, “The New Operational Dynamics of Business Ecosystems: Implications for Policy, Operations and Technology Strategy,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 03-030 (2003)

[4] Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien, The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability, Harvard Business School Press, 2004

[5] Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (2005), and e.g. Charles Leadbeater

[6] David Messerschmitt and Clemens Szyperski, Software Ecosystem – Understanding an Indispensable Technology and Industry, MIT Press, 2003