Ask the Author: Ramon Stoppelenburg
Answered Questions (2)
Ramon Stoppelenburg
Living alone in Phnom Penh, I always heard my neighbor lady crying through the thin walls every night. Yesterday I learned the apartment next door has been empty for three years.
Ramon Stoppelenburg
In 2001, I created one of the first social networks on the internet — Letmestayforaday.com — which connected me with over thousands of strangers who opened their homes to me across five continents. For almost three years, I lived this radical experiment in trust, a journey that UNESCO later recognized as digital heritage.
But here’s the mystery: what happened to all those people?
These weren’t just hosts — they were early digital pioneers who believed in a stranger’s story before Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram even existed, before algorithms decided who we should trust.
Then the internet changed. From 2007 social media took over. Most of them vanished, their change of ISP changed their email addresses forever. Some moved country. Some died. Many just disappeared into the digital ether.
The book would follow a protagonist trying to track down those lost connections 30+ years later — only to realize that some of them never existed quite the way he remembered. Were the connections as real as they felt? Did the digital personas match the people behind them? And what happens when you start to question whether your most meaningful relationships might have been performances all along?
It’s part detective story, part meditation on digital identity, part reckoning with the mythology we create around our own past. Because maybe the real mystery isn’t where those people went — but whether the version of myself who lived that adventure was ever real to begin with.
That’s actually what my Dutch novel-in-progress, Het Laatste Hostel, explores — the gap between who we are online, and who we are when nobody’s watching.
But here’s the mystery: what happened to all those people?
These weren’t just hosts — they were early digital pioneers who believed in a stranger’s story before Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram even existed, before algorithms decided who we should trust.
Then the internet changed. From 2007 social media took over. Most of them vanished, their change of ISP changed their email addresses forever. Some moved country. Some died. Many just disappeared into the digital ether.
The book would follow a protagonist trying to track down those lost connections 30+ years later — only to realize that some of them never existed quite the way he remembered. Were the connections as real as they felt? Did the digital personas match the people behind them? And what happens when you start to question whether your most meaningful relationships might have been performances all along?
It’s part detective story, part meditation on digital identity, part reckoning with the mythology we create around our own past. Because maybe the real mystery isn’t where those people went — but whether the version of myself who lived that adventure was ever real to begin with.
That’s actually what my Dutch novel-in-progress, Het Laatste Hostel, explores — the gap between who we are online, and who we are when nobody’s watching.
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