Great piece here about the way the Tea Party in the USA is now a formidable voting tendency, based on mass decentralised networked commitment:

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.

Shucks.

This sort of thing was fun when it helped elect President Obama. Now it’s nasty right-wing extremism.

But, tea partiers say, if you think moving votes and passing bills are what they are really all about, you have not taken the full measure of their ambition. No, the real point is to change the country’s political culture, bending it back toward the self-reliant, liberty-guarding instincts of the Founders’ era…

Many years? How many? "We have a 40-year plan," Meckler says. "We don’t want to raise another generation of sheeple."

Let’s have some of that here too, please.