About this paper
What The Open Visor wants, what it does not want, and how it works — and who writes it.
The writer
Jacobus van Merksteijn · Malta
What I do is see connections. Between physics and public administration, between education and economics, between ship coatings and democracy. Not as a specialist in one field, but as someone who moves between fields that rarely read one another.
I am the founder and developer of GuardSkin Ltd (industrial coatings), Carbon Alert and TerraClean (biomass conversion and CO₂ storage), SolarSkin (solar-protective coatings), and work on a conical vortex fusion reactor. I write in four languages — Dutch, English, German, and in the translation of The Open Visor also Russian. My base is Malta.
How I think
The work I do — coatings, fusion, biomass, democracy — has little in common at first glance. But it shares one way of seeing: you stand in front of a pattern others do not yet see, and you design something that shifts it. Sometimes that is a molecule. Sometimes it is an institution.
What keeps me awake is that Western culture has grown ever better, since the Enlightenment, at measuring the outside of the world, and ever worse at perceiving the inside of the human being. Edition 3 and the Manifesto Room for the primal feeling are about this. Edition 4 is about what this does to our institutions — banks, funds, regulation, law. It is everywhere the same pattern, in a different costume.
The Open Visor is my attempt to share this with others. Not because I want to be right. Because I believe that the child who lives in each of us — also in the banker and the regulator — cannot, in the long run, survive in a world that promises only what can be measured.
What it wants
To make visible the connections that specialised media do not cover. In ordinary language, for anyone willing to think along without first having to study for ten years.
What it does not want
No party politics. No advertising. No tracking. No selling of reader data. No clickbait, no outrage for the sake of outrage. And above all: no blinkers.
How it works
Editions appear when they are ready — no fixed calendar. Between editions, in What surfaces, shorter work appears when something surfaces. Below every article, readers can respond under their full name. AI helps with translation, spam filtering and summaries — editorial decisions remain human.
How it sustains itself
No advertising and no subscription model. I bear the costs myself. Readers who wish to contribute can do so in a later edition through a one-off or annual donation. For now: reading and taking part is free and remains free.