The Starfish vs the Spider

Vyenkata Bhatta is working on a piece for ISKCON News.com about "the furore surrounding Bhakta Corey / Caitanya das' blog" and the GBC response.

Ekendra das asked me for my input on the matter. There are many angles that this can be approached from, such as the gender roles issue (for a more thoughtful consideration of that issue by a contemporary younger generation devotee see Triyuga's recent posts here and here), or the dynamics of relationship between spiritual master and disciple (Caitanya das has publicly distanced himself from his spiritual master).

However, I focus more on the way in which the Internet changes the balance of power, and thus the constitution of ISKCON. It's a classic decentralized vs centralized organizational struggle. The GBC and "the ISKCON institution" represents a centralized organization (albeit a very disorganized one), while the burgeoning ISKCON community represents a decentralized one. My video podcast review of "The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations", a recent study on the dynamics of conflict between centralized and decentralized organizations, contains some insight into why the GBC is particularly vulnerable to this dynamic.

Here's the author speaking on the book, then me riffing on it.

Pursuant to the military analogy in that video, the GBC statement represents the old school centralized response of sending a B52 squadron over to bomb a foreign country. What they needed were special forces to do a surgical strike. Unfortunately they don't have any special forces.

Here's me. This was the first video podcast I ever did - I already got the feedback on how bad it's filmed thanks. :-)

Since I made this podcast Atma Yoga has become more powerful economically. We are now working on efficient structural evolution without centralizing, which is currently the only model ISKCON has. More on that soon...