might as well plug this again, it's certainly crucial to understanding...
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Somewhat off-topic, but I thought this article points out some aspects which are good to keep in mind as well. Especially regarding why the "Tea Party" model can be influential to other countries.
(the original article was deleted, this has the text)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-blo ... 1379/posts
Will vote fraud emerge as a tea party cause? Maybe, maybe not. Meckler, the closest thing the movement has to an organizational visionary, meant what he said. No one gives orders: In the expansive dominion of the Tea Party Patriots, which extends to thousands of local groups and literally countless activists, people just do stuff, talk to each other, imitate success, and move the movement.
"Essentially what we're doing is crowd-sourcing," says Meckler, whose vocabulary betrays his background as a lawyer specializing in Internet law. "I use the term open-source politics. This is an open-source movement." Every day, anyone and everyone is modifying the code. "The movement as a whole is smart."
Can it work? In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale. Tea party activists believe that their hivelike, "organized but not organized" (as one calls it) structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule book for political organizing, turning decades of established practice upside down. If they succeed, or even half succeed, the tea party's most important legacy may be organizational, not political.
[...]
Strange though it may seem, this is a coordinated network, not a hierarchy. There is no chain of command. No group or person is subordinate to any other. The tea parties are jealously independent and suspicious of any efforts at central control, which they see as a sure path to domination by outside interests. "There's such a uniqueness to every one of these groups, just as there's an individuality to every person," Wildman says. "It has this bizarre organic flow, a little bit like lava. It heats up in some places and catches on fire; it moves more slowly in other places."
Lava is a pretty good analogy. Ask the activists to characterize their organizational structure, however, and usually they will say it is a starfish.
Look, Ma, No Head
The Starfish and the Spider, a business book by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, was published in 2006 to no attention at all in the political world. The subtitle, however, explains its relevance to the tea party model: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.
Traditional thinking, the book contends, holds that hierarchies are most efficient at getting things done. Hierarchies, such as corporations, have leaders who can make decisions and set priorities; chains of command to hold everyone accountable; mechanisms to shift money and authority within the organization; rules and disciplinary procedures to prevent fracture and drift. This type of system has a central command, like a spider's brain. Like the spider, it dies if you thump it on the head.
The rise of the Internet and other forms of instantaneous, interpersonal interaction, however, has broken the spider monopoly, Brafman and Beckstrom argue. Radically decentralized networks -- everything from illicit music-sharing systems to Wikipedia -- can direct resources and adapt ("mutate") far faster than corporations can. "The absence of structure, leadership, and formal organization, once considered a weakness, has become a major asset," the authors write. "Seemingly chaotic groups have challenged and defeated established institutions. The rules of the game have changed."
Moreover, hierarchies are at a loss to defeat networks. Open systems have no leader or headquarters; their units are self-funding, and their members often work for free (think Wikipedia). Even in principle, you can't count or compartmentalize the participants, because they come and go as they please -- but counting them is unnecessary, because they can communicate directly with each other. Knowledge and power are distributed throughout the system.
As a result, the network is impervious to decapitation. "If you thump it on the head, it survives." No foolish or self-serving boss can wreck it, because it has no boss. Fragmentation, the bane of traditional organizations, actually makes the network stronger. It is like a starfish: Cut off an arm, and it grows (in some species) into a new starfish. Result: two starfish, where before there was just one.
"We're a starfish organization," says Scott Boston, the Tea Party Patriots' educational coordinator, and a rare paid staffer. He started a tea party group in Bowling Green, Ohio, but then let it slide when he went to school. Filling the gap, another group popped up; now there are two. Groups fuse as well as split. In Dallas, Emanuelson says, if a coordinator burns out, "sometimes another coordinator picks up the reins, but if not, a group can get involved with a nearby group." No one else even needs to know about it.
From Washington's who's-in-charge-here perspective, the tea party model seems, to use Wildman's word, bizarre. Perplexed journalists keep looking for the movement's leaders, which is like asking to meet the boss of the Internet. Baffled politicians and lobbyists can't find anyone to negotiate with. "We can be hard to work with, because we're confusing," Meckler acknowledges. "We're constantly fighting against the traditional societal pressure to become a top-down organization."
[...]
"There have been many efforts to create decentralized movements before," says Francesca Polletta, a sociologist at the University of California (Irvine) and a student of political movements. Those efforts, however, have been smaller in scale than the tea party. And, ironically, they have typically been offshoots of the political Left. (Structurally speaking, you could do worse than to think of the Tea Party Patriots as a left-wing organization with a right-wing, or at least libertarian, ideology.)
[...]
Not coincidentally, the educational coordinator is among the Tea Party Patriots' handful of paid employees. "Our real mission," says Sally Oljar, a national coordinator, "is education and providing resources to grassroots activists who want to return the country to our founding principles. We recognize that's going to require a cultural change that will take many years to accomplish."
Many years? How many? "We have a 40-year plan," Meckler says. "We don't want to raise another generation of sheeple."
One hears again, there, echoes of leftist movements. Raise consciousness. Change hearts, not just votes. Attack corruption in society, not just on Capitol Hill. In America, right-wing movements have tended to focus on taking over politics, left-wing ones on changing the culture. Like its leftist precursors, the Tea Party Patriots thinks of itself as a social movement, not a political one.
Centerless swarms are bad at transactional politics. But they may be pretty good at cultural reform. In any case, the experiment begins.
See also:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/glo ... works.html
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/glo ... ation.html
"MEND, Tea Party, 4Chan, Wikileaks, al Qaeda, Linux, etc."
(Chinese restaurant model vs. McDonald's model)
...
I take any statement about the "Tea Party" sticking around with a huge grain of salt (as soon as a Republican president comes around and the MSM changes it's tune again they'll go *poof*) - but this:
"the tea party's most important legacy may be organizational, not political."
...can also be applied to the Obama campaign machine's fancy tactics of network-creation, and disregard of the classic "Democratic machine". Think tanks are coming up with this stuff, trying to keep up with the effects of the internet and cell phones. What creepy assholes.
