Mr. Zuckerberg asked at Facebook about thoughts concerning Facebook. What is the essence of it really, and how may it develop. This is not a critical essay, but an essay to lay a philosophical idea behind some of the UI development.

Lets have a little tour back memory lane, to where it all started, that is the IT, computer business. It started with Gopher. I remember when I were at university we had this new device that could show a coffee machine somewhere else in the world, we were like; thats amazing! Then we had a computer with a mouse, the idea was again just hilariously ground breaking.

But then again, let us just look a little further back to when some of the hippies were listening to Clearwater revival and talking over something called the Well. Strange, they talked a lot about Openess I remember. Openness became a thing for the nerds. Open source, free code and so on. An ideological strand within the computer community, that gave us things as Wikipedia and Android.

If we take a look at that stream, we can, if we wish, take a small step even further back to the beginning of the cold war, and we may have an idea about what this is about. At the time the great leader of the atomic development team that gave us the tech behind nuclear warheads mr. Niels Bohr, a Danish physician, was in deep trouble. He just realised that he had invented a tool that could effectively end the entire existence of the planet, and he reached out. He made this beautifully scripted letter to the UN, called the “Weapon of Openness”, you could call that the secret simulacrum of all geeks. The kind of deeper scripture of Anonymous and all those free wheeling internet hippies.

Openess. I happen to know a little bit about that idea, because you see mr. Bohr did not just take that idea out of the open. It was a part of a Danish discourse on ethics of that time, that seeped out internationally, and yes, now I will give you the deeper meaning of it. That comes with another beautiful story.

You see mr. Bohr was a friend of a philosopher called K.E. Løgstrup. Mr. Løgstrup was one of those rare thinkers that actually invented his own philosophy, and, by all means a lost thinker that many churches could take up. He was the true heir to Kierkegaard, in my eyes.

He had a beautiful wife, a certain Rosalia Løgstrup. Just as Kierkegaard was helplessly infatuated with a certain Regine, Knud was in love with his beautiful wife, GERMAN wife.

Under the second world war, one day the German soldiers came knocking on the door of the Løgstrups, and Rosalia had to answer the call. The thing was, that Knud was a part of the resistance, a leading part, and the soldiers wanted him.

So there you have it, a German Rosalia speaking to German soldiers about her husband who were fighting the Germans. A dilemma. Rosalia did not solve this dilemma, but told the German soldiers a little about where he might be. Not all, but a little.

Happily Knud was never caught, but he was questioning the wisdom of Rosalia, so she answered him; it is a basic human trait to be open. It is when we lose our ability to be open that we lose trust.

It is what makes us human.

Now, fast forward to Facebook, perhaps mr. Zuckerberg can actually use this wisdom? Openness is more than just a principle, it is one of the basic things of humanity. If you create more openness in the world, you will, by doing that, make people see themselves, their loved ones and perhaps even their enemies more openly, and thereby bring them more humanity.

G-d bless the will to be open.