Sharing –
Humans learned to share early on – out of necessity or empathy. The digital commons is therefore not a technological revolution, but actually a spiritual one, which today is known under the names Open Source and Public Domain Its basic idea is already formulated with astonishing precision in the Gospel of John (John 6:1–13): A child brings five loaves of bread and two fish – and from the gesture of giving arises abundance.
“You give them something to eat” – with this statement by Jesus, a simple act becomes collective. It spreads like wildfire; today we say “it goes viral”.
What happens there is the earliest description of the open source principle: seemingly limited resources are multiplied through cooperation, trust, and community spirit. Not ownership, but participation – Sharing – creates abundance. With the instruction "Gather up the leftover fragments, so that nothing is lost" (John 6:12), a second rule is added: sustainable reuse.
Translating these patterns into the present reveals a continuity spanning millennia. The digital tools on which our everyday private and professional information is based—Linux, Firefox, WordPress, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Let's Encrypt, the Khan Academy—are based on one and the same ethos: the voluntary sharing of knowledge and code, the disclosure of structures, and the collective cultivation of a common good.
This openness is not a moral gesture, but a form of cultural or social intelligence without which humanity will not survive. It transforms scarcity into abundance because it understands information as a non-consumable resource. Those who share lose nothing—they gain in reach, truthfulness, and acceptance.
With the advent of so-called "artificial intelligence," a new dimension seems to be opening up for this principle. I find the term "algorithmic intelligence" more fitting: Open language models, freely available datasets, and collaborative learning platforms are helping to make education, creativity, and social and technical knowledge more accessible worldwide. The global education revolution is unstoppable. The gap between experts and learners, between those who know and those who are searching, is beginning to close. Everyone can acquire skills in a short time that were previously unimaginable. Elite, dominant knowledge can no longer be maintained.
Heaven on earth? Not at all.
Spiritual vigilance is essential. The old power structures have long since undermined these new possibilities and realities, attempting to exploit them for their own ends. Thus, we face the same highly dangerous dilemma today as Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project: between empowerment and abuse, between a seemingly value-free thirst for knowledge and responsibility, between courage and doubt.
