Corporations are a grand example of the ‘emperor has no clothes’. It’s all about promise. It’s all about what we’re going to do in the future.

They’re constantly undergoing these change processes, reorganization, restructuring, downsizing, rightsizing. You fire people, you hire people, you shift around the signs, but very little, at the end of the day, actually changes.

I have been assisting at three reorganization where people have been losing their jobs, where people have been crying, where they were working since 20 years or more.

So, in the back of my head, I always had the thought: you are giving the best of yourself to this company, but remember one day, they will call you and say, you have to pack your stuff in a week.

Many of the rituals and structures of primary education are designed to prepare people for factory labor. That’s why they have bells ringing and you have to get up and you have to move from room to room. And there’s no particular reason you should have to move from room to room.

The interesting question for me is, why are they still doing that? Because it’s not like very many kids going to school are going to be working in factories anymore. My conclusion is that they are preparing us for a life that isn’t going to make a lot of sense.

[Vanessa describing why she wanted to throw herself under the train everyday she went to work] Maybe the point is, I feel like I was something, and then I was, shaped into, suffocated into being like something else, something less, something smaller. And that’s why I kind of developed the sense that I’m not good enough, and […] there is something wrong with me. Like there is something fundamentally, deeply wrong with me as a human being. And perhaps that is something that I’ve been trying to kind of then fix through these different achievements in life, like go to university, get those results, because I felt that that is my responsibility, as Vanessa, as the person I am.

[Showing a development screenshot of Macintosh, where in the menubar, instead of the modern command symbol there is an Apple logo behind keys] One day Steve Jobs came in and was like “That is our logo! That’s our crown jewel! You can’t just throw that! You now have an Apple farm in every menu!”. So, then we had to go back and think like “what could it was the command key or the feature key?”. Yes, I did try ten commandments! It was stupid!

[…] But um I used to look through books sometimes when I was at a loss for something, and I looked at it in this symbol dictionary and there was that symbol, and it said “feature” and we were think we used to call it the feature key. So, I kind of thought well you could definitely draw it in 16 by 16 and it kind of looked like a cloverleaf highway to me [?!] so, maybe it was like good? you know?

You really want every symbol you make to mean something, and somebody emailed me […] and must have heard me say that I wish that symbol meant more, and he sent me a picture of […] the derivation of that symbol in Scandinavia was that it’s a castle with turrets. So that’s why it’s a good symbol for um, you know “landmarks”, and I just loved that it actually meant something after all.