That vile tweet about Jutta Leerdam and her new boyfriend: Was it necessary?

Jutta Leerdam has a new boyfriend. She has been linked to American martial artist, Youtuber and “bad boy” Jake Paul. I read it on one or the other location And I thought about it A scene from the movie Flodder With these two fancy women in a convertible, one about to have an affair with Johnny Fluder and the other saying, “You wouldn’t do stupid things, would you? You would do stupid things!” And then: “I always thought you were a little tacky.”

I was obviously satisfied with that hunch, because I tweeted a half minute later. I knew it wasn’t a funny tweet, but it’s still fun enough for a few likes, maybe a retweet or something. I updated my timeline in anticipation of, “Can someone appreciate my pop culture reference?” It soon became apparent that I was not the only one with an opinion about the couple: I had entered the dubious company of old men who poured all sorts of nasty things about Leerdam. Shocked and Embarrassed I deleted my stupid tweet again, thank God no one read it.

digital footprint

This week it was announced that the KB National Library wants all Dutch tweets archive. This is urgent, because with Elon Musk’s unique policy, Twitter could stop broadcasting from one day to the next, and all those billions of tweets would just disappear.

I tried to imagine what this archive looks like, who is waiting for it, but above all what we leave behind forever. And what is my digital footprint, which will be stored forever. Will my hastily deleted tweet about Jota Leerdam be in between? And all those other silly jokes, often at some celebrity’s expense? How will I be remembered with all these thousands of digital streams?

Ionic Twitter Party

In the following days I swallowed all my prophylactic binaries. I didn’t write about the Edwin Evers and William Alexander podcast, I didn’t talk about Gordon getting married and I even left the desire, always good for a Twitter spoof party. The National Library will have to do without vitriol from now on.

I have shared a video of Typhoon’s amazing performance lover, a kind of musical mob reminiscent of Stromae and Childish Gambino, but in Dutch. “How cool is thatI added, hoping in vain to polish my profile a bit by adding something positive. Immediately I got a text from a friend: “Oh irony?”

Perhaps this is also what historians think, when they dig through digital archives in the far future for a point cloud of all Dutch speakers and for computational analysis. A mean tweet about Jutta Leerdam, something ridiculous about Typhoon, which ends up in the “annoying guys” category.