“The Pirate’s Compass Points Analogue: Following the Dutch Back to Solid Ground”

We Dutch have always prided ourselves on our commercial instincts. Call it a neurotypical business gene, if you will. After all, we’re the pioneering spirits who launched the world’s first stock market while everyone else was still bartering chickens. Wi-Fi? You’re welcome. That little financial revolution that digitized your money? Largely our doing.

By the early 2000s, we’d convinced ourselves that human interaction in banking was quaintly obsolete—an unnecessary expense in our gleaming digital utopia. Bank branches closed faster than a tulip wilts in August. Personal service became as rare as an affordable Amsterdam apartment.
But it seems our government has awoken from its digital fever dream. Suddenly, they’re insisting every citizen must have access to a cash dispenser within five kilometres. Imagine that—actual physical money! Next, they’ll suggest we talk to each other face-to-face.
And the cherry on this analogue sundae? Official recommendations to keep three days’ worth of food at home. Not digital food tokens or blockchain-based nutrition credits—actual edible substances that don’t require a password or two-factor authentication to consume.

Our Dutch evolution tells the whole story. We progressed from telegraph to fax to television, HTML to algorithms to AI, each step more ethereal than the last. Our musical tastes followed the same trajectory: from techno to trance to dub to Gabber—increasingly digital, increasingly divorced from acoustic reality. Even our recreational habits marched lockstep from jenever to beer to marijuana to hash to cocaine to pills to MDMA—chasing ever more synthetic highs.

So, what bugs have infected our high-flying cloud-based system to provoke this hard reset? What digital parasites caused our national operating system to crash into analogue reality?

The keyword here is “important.” Yes, the once-bullied nerds have become the bullies, wielding their algorithms like digital cudgels (those wooden clubs that were the weapon of choice for medieval thugs).
But the truly important people—those power-hungry mongrels who’ve existed throughout history—remain unchanged. These ego-infants, eternally dissatisfied with their station in life, grasp for that invisible ladder to ethereal heights. They never learn that nothing accompanies us to whatever comes next if anything does.

Perhaps our beloved Earth is merely a laboratory for testing half-baked theories or the universe’s designated asylum—a convenient place to stow away the cosmic crazies.
As for me? I’m perfectly content with keeping the minimum balance in those digital powerhouses while being served by an actual human being. Even if it means waiting patiently as the customer ahead of me gossips to her heart’s content before standing up and crying out to the cashier, “I love you!”—a declaration that earns eye-rolls from me and everyone else in the queue.

After all, isn’t an eye roll exchanged with fellow humans infinitely more satisfying than staring blankly at an error message on your banking app? In our rush to digitize everything, perhaps we forgot that the most sophisticated interface ever created remains the human face—complete with all its expressions, flaws, and unexpected declarations of love to startled bank tellers.

The Netherlands may have led the charge into our brave new digital world, but we’re now pioneering something far more revolutionary: remembering how to be analogue humans in an increasingly fragile digital age.

May Harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. Also, call me melancholic, but I’d rather fly with wine than whining about files. Perhaps that’s the true Dutch wisdom emerging from our analogue revival—enjoying the tangible pleasures of life instead of fretting over digital documents and error messages. Sometimes, the oldest technologies—a cork, a glass, and fermented grapes—still provide the most reliable elevation.