Lately, I've been wondering if "business models" can only apply to confined hierarchies and causal relationships. What you've written here has brought that idea into sharper focus. A ecosystem of 200 species, thriving on a staggering complex web of interdependencies, defies thorough description. It's only possible to model an artificially isolated portion of the complex web. The system itself must serve as the model.

I'm also wondering if there's a big difference between selling deliverables and selling privileges. If what is being sold can be inventoried, scheduled, packaged or regulated, conventional business models seem inevitable to me. What's for sale is proprietary and in need of controls. However when privileges are for sale, individuals create unique experiences of access, contribution, reciprocity and unexpected discoveries. The purchase of the privilege is small in the context of so much self-propelled involvement. Like the ecosystem, the complexity is overwhelming. What occurs inside the privileged boundary is non-linear and out-of-control. Yet the value generated can easily be more responsive, innovative, customized, thorough, timely and current. This suggests another quartet of transitions to accompany yours:

1. Extends the natural proliferation and diversification of interdependent life forms into the diversity of human endeavors
2. Obsolesces the domination of nature by human "business models" and control systems
3. Retrieves human abilities to be nurtured by robust natural systems, cyclical processes, and interdependent arrangements
4. Reverses going online into going offline -- in order to probe-sense-respond to the immediate, whole situation