I had a nightmare tonight, the kind that wake you up all breathless, scared and grateful that it was just a dream. My daughter has those. In my nightmare there was a crowd of children and some adults, it looked like a kids party. Then the evil came, and I started shepherding the children away, taking them out of evil’s way. I remember dreaming about picking them up, one by one, putting them on a couch, giving them toys, asking them to stay quiet, to stay put. When I finally huddled all children together, I turned around and realized that all other adults were gone, just disappeared. I was alone, standing between children and the evil that was staring at me with glee. That’s when I woke up.

During my Saturday morning coffee and catching up on the school reading the chapter was about Windigo, the cannibal spirit of the Anishinaabe stories. At the table next to me a man was talking very loudly about this great time management software his company was selling. Not only this software creates timesheets for employees, it “helps” them account for every minute task. Imagine, the man was saying, you’re working on a project and your phone rings, some personal call. Our software stops the timer, so that your call doesn’t count towards your working time, then restarts it again when your call is over. Imagine how much easier it is, than trying to remember every little thing you did when filing your time sheet on Friday. How much easier it becomes to control a factory with 500 employees. We just count everything. I looked up from my Windigo page, incredulous. Life imitating art.

I started listening to an audiobook Imagination. A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin and learned the term long-termism. Long-termism is a philosophy that allows very rich and spoiled Silicon Valley brats not to give an f about the crisis that is happening here and now, as long as they can invest their money and their brains in some far away technocratic future where their legacy will be carried on by “digital descendants.” The idea of it was so dystopian that it made me laugh out loud. Wow, so the Silicon Valley dudes stole the basic technique of the original colonizers, aka Christian missionaries – focus attention on the uncertain, vague and imaginary afterlife, so that you can ignore, destroy and plunder the tangible and beautiful world you have in front of you. This made me think back to the conversation I had earlier this week, the one about the love of the dying things. I would rather love the fragile, dying and undervalued present world than hope for some future one where only the fittest survive.