"Instead of thinking of life as a series of checks which I need to tick off - something which can be displayed on a graph that climbs ever up and to the right - I like to think of my life as a canvas which I can paint with whatever weird artwork I feel like [...] Here is my mandatory Venn diagram: the status quo needs to change, and life is short. When we put these two together, we can see that we need to subvert the status quo and have as much fun as possible along the way!"

"The first example is BBQ Becky, a woman who called the police on black people having a barbecue [... The response was to host a really massive barbecue and] the community has come together, everyone is welcome, thousands of people turned out. There was great food, and dominoes. And now it's a tradition! [...] The second example is called 'futbolistas 4 life' [...] Something that was important for a lot of the students was feeling like they had this space to play; and freedom and ownership over their play and their bodies in a place that felt good [...] 'Having a space like a soccer field where we can play and love one another: that is an act of resistance'."

"When you do these little, joyful subversions remember that they can be really small. They don't have to be these grandiose events with hundreds or thousands of people. When face-tracking came out, I managed to sneak little pink hearts into your Mac. At that time, there wasn't a lot of pink happening at all [laughs] It makes me happy to think I got Steve Jobs to approve this while pink hearts were coming out his head. Another example is the Technics 1200 turntables as your avatar - iconic in hip hop - and some other Easter eggs which are still in MacOS."

"Another thing you can do is experiment with format [...] For instance, using this traditional talk format to instead make everyone dance [...] Another one is subverting technology. This one is pretty profound. We talk a lot about the epidemic of loneliness [...] somehow, we have accepted the fact that computation has to be locked behind these little rectangles [...] How many years are we into the journey of computers and yet we still accept that we can get locked into things like this!? What would happen if we turned computers inside out? There's an organization called DynamicLand which does exactly this. It's like cooking or scrapbooking; except it's all software and we're building things together."

"Creating a space for change does not necessarily mean you're doing it yourself; you're just making it possible for others."

"When you think about dominant narrative and the status quo, symbolism is a big part of that, because a lot of how we relate to each other is through symbols and stories."

The adizkookaan and the memoryspacetime where they reside are strange things...

By being playfully literate on one level, and also supplying a layer of kaona or hidden meaning, we offer people an invitation to open themselves to deepen engagement.

"I think change is rarely straightforward and, unlike the covers of magazines tend to show, it doesn't happen with one person on their own. We have a lot of room to build on history, to build on all the tremendous work of people before us who have striven for a better world. One group of people who did something that was pretty important were the Black Panthers. One thing people don't realise about them is that they instituted a free breakfast program for children. We talk a lot about education and all the different statistics and projects there, but if people come to class hungry they cannot learn [...] This free breakfast program actually ended up being the blueprint for the Federal free breakfast program which happens today."

"These are recipes of resilience. The strength of our communities is, at its heart, based on the meals we share together."

"I spent many years in conference rooms and, at some point in time after being at Apple for a little while, I felt like I wanted to do something a little different and I wound up joining Khan Academy. There were a couple of reasons I was attracted to it: one of them was that they are a not-for-profit which is building software, and that's pretty rare. I thought, 'hmmm, what would happen if our incentive structures were a little different?' I wanted to democratize learning too, so the mission was really profound for me. And the last thing was about the culture, because I felt that the organization was really open to some experimentation with cultural shifts.

"We wanted to shift educational software from assessing students and just asking 'Do you get it yet?' to letting them explore magical worlds themselves where, for instance, understanding the mathematics would give you powers [...] And all kinds of interesting stuff fell out of it: visual and interactive properties of prime numbers and so on.

"People tend to have a very vivid imagination when they work in design: you actually, literally, have the tools and you're constantly drawing possible futures. When you are iterating, you are literally drawing multiple possible futures. So, if you take a second and think about something that you want to change, and you look around you - there are so many potential co-conspirators here! - this is really an invitation to you to make some friends and start some shit and joyfully subvert the status quo!"

Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence.

The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.

Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent responses to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations.

Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

“Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, more beautiful than sorrow. To make this discovery is to embrace joy as a moral obligation.” - André Gide