“Exit Spaink – my very last piece,” wrote Karin Spaink above it blog post that she published on her own website on Friday. “If all went according to plan, I will have died this morning – a death that I chose myself and that I have discussed and prepared for for months.”
Karin Spaink indeed passed away this Friday. That happened at home in Amsterdam, she chose euthanasia, she was 68 years old. Spaink has made a name for himself as a journalist and columnist since the 1990s Het Paroolpublicist and tech expert. She wrote about health (including her own), feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and politics. Above all, she was one of the first in the Netherlands to see the risks of the internet in relation to privacy. The rights of internet users were under pressure, which is why she co-founded the digital civil rights movement Bits of Freedom in 1999.
Spaink wrote books, including about the popularity of the Canta, the type of microcar that she drove around. “The only aid for the disabled that healthy people envy,” she described the Canta. In The criminal body she put an end to the term she coined “the ears mafia”; best-selling, influential ‘medical’ authors who attribute the cause and course of every disease to factors ‘between the ears’.
The theme of health necessarily occupied Spaink (Amsterdam, 1957). In the late 1980s, after completing an English teacher training course and studying sociology, Spaink was a computer programmer at aircraft manufacturer Fokker and an employee at the scientific office of GroenLinks predecessor PSP. During that period she suffered from blind spots, became tired and dizzy. These turned out to be the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis, an incurable, slowly spreading disease of the central nervous system. Later she suffered a brain haemorrhage, breast cancer and depression.
“I’m not sick, it’s my body,” Spaink wrote. She explained this in 1992 NRC. “The crux of being ill is that you notice that body and mind are no longer one. Movements are no longer automatic, you have to control your body – it requires an act of will. You have to learn to resign yourself to that.”
‘My Parool’
Spaink was perhaps best known for the columns she published for thirty years in Het Parool. “Mine Parooltje writing”, she once called it, she often spent the whole week working on it. She warned her readers, among other things, about the risks of algorithms and tech companies. “Many data traces are extracted from people without them knowing about it, let alone control over what happens to it,” she wrote, for example. in 2019. An organization had proudly announced that it would advise concert halls on which bands to program based on data. Spaink: “With such an algorithm in hand, who on earth would have ever booked the fledgling Nirvana?”
At Bits of Freedom Spaink organized the ‘Big Brother Awards’. In 2007, visitors to that festive award ceremony received the award themselves “to their shock”, Bits of Freedom writes in an in memoriam. That was “an example of Karin’s sharpness.” “Because people also had to be made aware of their own responsibility. They did receive a glass of cava to ease the pain.” Just last week, Spaink joined a group of journalists, tech experts and scientists who to the judge steps due to the proposed takeover of Solvinity by an American company – and the risk of Dutch personal data falling into the hands of the US.
Spaink stopped in 2022 with her columns. “Anger has been replaced by concern,” she said. “About politics, about Ukraine, about the gap between rich and poor. It’s all getting worse.” In her last column she gave a final piece of advice: “The press, women, homosexuals, black people – learn to listen to the canaries of freedom. Because our rights are always the first to die.”
In 2023, her body overtook Spaink “for the umpteenth time,” now with a severe MS attack – and this time it came not good,” she writes. Spaink continued to deteriorate. She therefore stopped at Follow the Money, where she was editor-in-chief. “Instead of waiting to see what else I had to hand in, I chose death,” Spaink writes. “I honestly think dying too early is less bad than the prospect of losing my independence. This was my very last project: organizing my own death.”
She concludes her last blog post with some final advice. “You may always set your own boundaries, and live by them – or die by them.”
Her website will remain up for another ten years. At the top of www.spaink.net it says: I write, therefore I am.
Also read
‘Cantatas revolve around each other in courtship’, wrote Karin Spaink in 2012 about a ‘Canta ballet’ she devised
