Catastrophic battles have already begun and loom large on the horizon between traditional hierarchal powers and the growing trend of lateral power structures, according to the University of Sydney’s Mark Pesce.

Pesce spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum on the reasons hierarchal structures will lose out to hyperintelligent ad-hocracies unless they learn to reinvent themselves.

The “first casualty of war,” said Pesce, was the Church of Scientology, which last month was banned from editing content on laterally-powered Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia is a social agreement,” Pesce said, explaining that traditional power structures cannot use normal weapons to bring similar organizations down.

Even friendly organizations must explore a way to cross this divide, he continued, using the Obama ‘08 campaign’s “Houdini Project” as an example of two teams with the same goal who failed together.

The “Houdini Project” was the Obama campaigns citizen mobilization campaign, but as election day approached, the strict hierarchy of the main campaign headquarters couldn’t handle the onslaught of information coming in from the public, and the project died a quick death.

“The political campaigns of the future must learn how to cross that gulf,” Pesce said.