IN POLITICO KENNETH VOGEL WRITES about Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations as a Tea Party manual. It’s an interesting book — making many of the same points about horizontal knowledge and diseconomies of scale as I made earlier in Army of Davids — and the application to the Tea Party movement is obvious (even to why the Big Media folks are always trying to name a Tea Party leader, so that the movement can be tied down and destroyed). But has the book really become a manual for the Tea Party, as Vogel claims?

UPDATE: Reader Andrew Medina emails:

I’m not sure how many Tea Partiers have read it, but I know one thing for sure. Such movements are more of a state of mind and being than political movements with structure.

If one branch of the Tea Party stops, another one will pop up because it’s members don’t stop ever believing in what they believe. The left’s attempts at astro-turf fail because of this.

As further evidence to this I submit Anonymous and the hacking community. Its not an organization, its a state of mind and being. Anons will always be Anons, with or without the ‘chans. Hackers will always be hackers, with or without computers.

The Tea Party has truly succeeded where others have failed because the Tea Party’s essence is a state of being that is self-contained within each and every member of the Tea Party.

Good point.