106. A leap forward
I.
Grandad says: I remember a time when you could email the founder of WhatsApp a question and actually get a reply. That, as Abel once sang in Onderweg, is long gone. Questions had to go through press officers, and that was fine enough; if you were looking for answers, you could always give them a call. But Meta suddenly shut down its Dutch communications department at the end of 2023. This happened without any prior notice. In response to a message I sent to the spokesperson at the time, I simply received the reply that she was âunfortunately no longer availableâ for press enquiries and that I should henceforth email the international media address.
Now, emailing is always slow and cumbersome. You canât ask follow-up questions in a relaxed manner either. That is, if you get a reply at all, because Big Tech has high walls. So the fact that I received an invitation this week to a digital conversation with the director of WhatsApp, along with a handful of Dutch journalists, was striking to say the least.
WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart had heard that there was some commotion in the Netherlands surrounding his app. That the Dutch are switching en masse to the chat app Signal. Thatâs why he wanted to clear up a few âmisunderstandingsâ. I call it a charm offensive, because thatâs exactly what it is. The message in a nutshell: if you want to chat securely, you donât need to go to Signal; you can do that on WhatsApp too. So stick with us.
A few days later, like the rest of the Netherlands, I was added to an official WhatsApp chat. The service itself will share updates and tips there. The first is about encryption. âYour privacy is our priority,â the message reads. It canât be a coincidence that WhatsApp is bringing this up this very week.
I call this taking the initiative. WhatsApp says it doesnât see any drop-off in the figures for the Netherlands. But they will see Signal growing explosively. People who always chat via WhatsApp are now doing so with an (even more secure) competitor led by someone other than Mark Zuckerberg. WhatsApp isnât breaking a sweat over the rise of Signal, but if things werenât heating up a bit, they wouldnât be organising a press conference.
II.
As I write this, itâs still Book Week and Iâve just finished reading the book Gerwin van der Werf gave me: The Crater. Itâs about three teenagers who leave home to visit a German crater. Perhaps this will help lift their youngest brother, who has an excessive interest in the extraterrestrial, out of his depression. It turns into the sort of road trip where they get to know each other and themselves better. A gem of a Book Week gift â one of the best in years.
It deals with quite big themes and complex feelings; itâs no coincidence that thereâs a reference to the 113 helpline at the end of the story. But Van der Werf manages to keep it light, with witty observations such as: âThere are grown-ups called Joep; itâs unbelievable.â Theyâre not all equally sharp, mind you. Although weâre reading from the perspective of young Eden, our protagonist talks, for example, about âDutch rappers, that sort of music for lads whoâve just swapped their toy tractor for a souped-up fatbikeâ. Ok boomer.
But I did have a few laughs, and The Crater is moving at the end. Thatâs where the most beautiful passage is: âI always thought our imagination and intellect were too small to grasp anything of the universe, but thatâs not it; weâre simply too small physically and we live too short a life â we never get far enough, we crawl across the pale blue dot and thatâs already too much for us. So we turn inwards instead, for that space too is infinite.â
PS.
Promenade returns on 30 March and the creators are doing things slightly differently than weâre used to. Diederik Ebbinge welcomes his regular guests Henry van Loon, Eva Crutzen and Ton Kas to his French château for a relaxing break. But he has a surprise in store for them. The trailer is yet another one of those mad fever dreams that I really canât wait to see.
- - -The second season of Severance has ended. Unfortunately, because itâs a ridiculously good series with a visual style to die for. The music is just as fantastic, and in the Song Exploder podcast, the presenter describes the feeling of the music as if, as a viewer, youâre constantly walking into a trap. Hrishikesh Hirway chats with composer Theodore Shapiro about how he created the intro track. Super interesting, especially as you get to hear earlier versions. Listen!
NRC features a moving story by Bas Blokker as he clears out his late fatherâs bookcases. He had thousands of books â as many as 119 boxes full. The piles of books are memories for Blokker; his fatherâs handwriting is still visible in the margins. âIn the books I saw him learn, grow,â he writes. I can well imagine it; my own books are already very dear to me. Thatâs why I cried out âoh no!â when I reached the end of this essay.
Werner Herzog was a guest on 60 Minutes. Itâs good that the programme celebrates the life of the 82-year-old director who always does things differently from others. Just think: he teaches new filmmakers to forge documents and break open locks. For his film Fitzcarraldo (1982), he had a steamship hauled over a mountain in a jungle. That doesnât make you mad, he says, but rather the only one in Hollywood with both feet firmly on the ground. âWhen you look at the film industry, thereâs so much madness, so much illusion and so much ego that when I look at it, I know Iâm the only one whoâs normal. This is my proof.â
- - -Thereâs a new issue of The HTML Review, which you can only read online and is designed entirely for the web. Look how cool publications on the internet can be! Just scrolling through the table of contents is fantastic.
Director Spike Jonze has made a commercial for AirPods. Itâs a short film starring a dancing Pedro Pascal, and there are some lovely things happening with colour and sound. Now Iâm in the mood for a new feature film from Jonze; his last one was Her. From 2013!
- - -David Van Reybrouck on âthe return of a resentful, masculine, autocratic, populist political culture that thrives on simplificationsâ. The problem isnât Trump, he writes, because in the 1960s or 1970s, Trump wouldnât have stood a chance. It is not a particularly uplifting opinion piece. âApparently, so many feel so thoroughly duped by the current system that a completely brazen alternative â however much it is cobbled together from lies and empty promises, however much it comes from a convicted criminal who is the embodiment of the betrayal of democratic capitalism â seems appealing and celebratory. Just like in 1933.â
My mum is a fan of Rob de Nijs, so I grew up with songs like Banger Hart, Ritme van de Regen and Malle Babbe. I saw him perform the song Niet voor het laatst on De Wereld Draait Door. Perhaps his finest, at the very last moment. De Nijs passed away last week. âWhen I look at eternity / How small our time is / Itâs just a day and then itâs gone / Straight to the next.â
- - -Robin Sloan on how the internet is getting further ruined (and how we can save it): âA premonition is growing. I believe large swathes of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the creatures of the digital night: ghostly bots, cackling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punctuated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs & shops, beacons of reality & sincerity, nodes of a human overlay network.â
A documentary about American comic shops is coming out: Shopping for Superman. Having seen the trailer, all I can say is: support your locals!
- - -You have just read my 106th weekly blog, written between 17 and 23 March 2025. Subscribe to my free newsletter to receive this blog in your inbox every Sunday.