"Hack the planet" is always one sentence away from whatever I'm saying, a phrase I carry like a challenge coin I never take out of my pocket because most people would just laugh, and the laugh would close the door before I could get a foot in. Which is fine, because the people who already know what it means don't need me to say it, and the people who don't aren't going to get there through a reference anyway.
What it actually means is something I've been trying to articulate for years, and the closest I've gotten is this: there was a time when I was in a bubble with people who understood something the rest of the world didn't, and we were staying up too late, building things we couldn't fully justify, operating on the shared conviction that the work mattered even when we couldn't say why, and that feeling, of a group of people who had found each other and were having the time of their lives doing it, is the thing I keep trying to get back to.
Then they went to work, and the fight that was supposed to be against the machine became a fight for position inside it. Which I don't say as a condemnation, because money looks exactly like freedom until you've had enough of it to see the difference, and most people never get that far. But hackers, the real ones, aren't compelled by money; they're compelled by leverage, by the specific satisfaction of taking a system, any system, a compiler, a bureaucracy, a sourdough starter, and understanding it so completely that you can make it do something it was never designed to do, which is its own kind of escape velocity, a way of breaking from the gravity that keeps most people in stable, predictable orbits around the same tired center.
Bread came into my life as a direct response to feeling like I'd lost that. I wanted something physical, something whose value didn't depend on anyone's attention or a server staying up. Calories, specifically, the irreducible fact of calories, simple plants transformed by time and fermentation and your own hands into something almost perfectly designed for human hunger, a technology so old and so well-optimized that improving on it feels less like invention and more like archaeology. And the more I baked, the more it felt like the same thing: you're working with a living system, you're learning its behavior, you're adjusting your inputs based on what it tells you, you're trying to understand it completely enough to make it yours. The tools are different but the posture is identical.
Which leaves me with the problem I haven't solved, which is that I still feel like I'm in a prison and I want out, and the computer is both the cell and the only tool I have that reaches far enough to matter, because it's grafted to everyone now in a way that bread isn't, and walking away from it entirely means walking alone for longer than I'm willing to walk. So I hold both things, the starter on the counter and the terminal on the desk, and I look for where attention flows, and I try to stick a lever in there, something small enough to go unnoticed but angled right, pointed at a different path forward.
That's still hacking. It just takes longer to rise.