Could it be that the occupy movement around the world were simply the first reactions from the street, to the socioeconomic changes brought on by the digital revolution? After all, the industrial revolution saw its own share of hard fought rebalancing on the social front.

Indeed, the steam engine completely transformed lives at the time: peasants moved from the countryside to cities, leaving the fields to work in factories. People became waged, blue collar workers. Eventually, child work was regulated then outlawed. The workweek for adults also was regulated, then gradually reduced.

In other words, back in the 1850s, the pressure from the street, from people protesting, wrestled back the socioeconomic pendulum: the new found wealth from productivity gains and innovations was partly shared between the haves and the have nots.

Nowadays, the computer is the equivalent to the steam engine 200 odd years later: a new technology triggering spectacular ripple effects, for the last 30 years or so.

In both eras though, the private sector is always the quickest to adopt the new technologies. Then ensue deep socioeconomic and geopolitical changes. Eventually, civil society, though pretty stunned at first, wakes up and tries to rebalance the situation.

So these protests could well be interpreted as a social reaction to the changes the early digital revolution has brought about.

Finance has probably become the focus, the lightning rod, because the excesses of this sector are the most visible (and the most deeply felt in the United States, particularly since the near financial collapse in 2008.)

In the end, these protesters are definitely questioning the deepening gap between the rich and the poor, revealed in a growing concentration of wealth in the world - otherwise know as "the 1%".

At a deeper level, these protests may well be the tip of the iceberg (or the canary in a coal mine): the rebalancing of the socioeconomics in this early digital revolution. Very much so similar to the social unrests of the 1850s following the profound changes from the Industrial Revolution.

Let’s not forget that current global financial markets were built on the new digital information and communication technologies

So a mere 25 years since the founding of computer giants Microsoft or Apple, is it not time to take a closer look at the deep changes since the onset of the digital revolution?

Starting with the financial sector, is it not time to start reassessing these new practices, instead of letting our societies speed forward like on a runaway train, only to end up on the brink of a precipice, as witnessed in 2008?

Isn't this the message we could be hearing, albeit scrambled and unfocused, from the Occupy movement around the world?

What if these protesters were the first reformers of the current early digital revolution: the "bit" generation waking up in the western world, as they did in the Arab world, and taking on the digital revolution?

Charles-Antoine Rouyer is a Toronto-based independant journalist and course director at York University.