City on Fire

Indeed, instead of the term ‘leaderless’, some preferred the term ‘leaderful’: everyone had a part to play in this protest movement. Volunteers with megaphones or walkie-talkies may have helped to announce and coordinate, but they were not ‘leaders’. As a result, the movement avoided the disillusionment that the strong, centralised leadership of the Umbrella Movement ultimately engendered. Every participant in the 2019 movement felt invested, felt that they had their own contribution to make. Professor Francis Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong called it open-source protest. To use another analogy, one might think of it as a WikiProtest: everyone could make their own contributions to an integrated whole that the entire community then benefited from.

City on Fire
Antony Dapiran