It is fascinating to watch the early stages of a movement take shape, before a clear agenda and a set of leaders take the stage. For traditional journalists, it must be particularly challenging. They have been trained to look for the leaders. They want a press release with an official statement. Without this, they need to think more and dig deeper, and that means more work on an already tight schedule.

Inside the movement, people discuss what the message should be and who the messengers should be. It will be interesting to see what direction the #occupy movement takes. Nature abhors a leadership vacuum, and people will feel compelled to step forward and take leadership roles. Yet this runs into the old Animal Farm story where all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

It happens time and time again. Some group of challengers take on the status quo. If they are successful, they take over the status quo. They become the new status quo with new leaders. It goes back to the old question, "Are you a leader? A you a follower? Are those the only two choices?"

Will this happen with the #occupy movement? Pessimistically speaking, yeah, probably. Yet since this movement seems to be about a redistribution of political power, away from the corporate political oligarchy back to the populous, let us hope that it takes a long time for such a leadership to emerge.

Instead, I hope that this will be a movement that empowers people, that gets them to speak with their own voices, and not the voices of some appointed leaders. I hope this will be a movement that will get more people involved in the political process, from voting and working on campaigns to running for office, while at the same time diminishing the corporate influence on our political system that has gotten so out of control.

Hopefully, each person will find their own voice and the venues that work best for them, whether it be social media, from Facebook and Twitter to Diaspora, Hopefully, each person will find better ways of getting information than from news outlets controlled by large corporations. Hopefully, each person will think more critically about the media they consume and then produce better media themselves.

Will it be enough to prevent another Animal Farm moment? Probably not. Vigilance is a lot of work, and people eventually get tired. But, as long as the early fervor of a movement keeps people involved and vigilant, we can, for at least a short period of time be a more democratic country.