Efforts to make information conform to archaic notions of scarcity, ownership, and finite physical quantity--concepts that grew out of the agricultural and industrial age--merely lock us into old mental boxes of constraint and exploitation.

Visa’s founding CEO Dee Hock had a realization. He saw clearly that it was “beyond the power of reason to design an organization” capable of coordinating a global network of financial transactions of the sort that had started to develop.7 Yet, he also knew that nature regularly achieves just that. Why, he wondered, couldn’t “a human organization