In reflecting on my third hack, my “Desmos Diary” I considered three of Sacasas’ questions towards the ethics of artifacts.

Time and Experience

“3. “How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?””

Considering how much and how long we interact with different technologies, I found myself dwelling on the intentional frustration built into my project. While creating a journaling system through graphing equations seems counterintuitive and deliberately difficult, I actually found that this friction produced an unexpected intimacy with the content. The slowed pace forced me to consider each word, each thought more carefully than I would with traditional journaling methods. There’s something different about expressing emotions through mathematical constructs—it created a reflective distance that paradoxically allowed for deeper processing. Time stretched and compressed in unusual ways; what would have been quick entries became deliberate exercises in translation and expression.

I could imagine revisiting these equation-based journal entries and experiencing them differently than traditional text. The process of decoding my own thoughts might reveal patterns and connections I hadn’t noticed during the initial writing. This time dimension—the way the technology transforms not just recorded thoughts but their later review—suggests journaling technologies aren’t just about efficiency but about shaping how we engage with our past expressions.

Assumptions and Systems

“30. What assumptions about the world does the use of this technology tacitly encourage?”

“34. Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?”

My software invasion project, if theoretically implemented broadly, makes significant assumptions about users’ mathematical literacy. It presupposes that everyone can understand and manipulate graphing equations and somehow translate them to written language. This reliance on specialized knowledge immediately creates barriers to entry that traditional journaling platforms don’t have.

The project depends entirely on educational systems that prioritize certain types of mathematical knowledge. It reinforces the divide between those who received particular types of education and those who didn’t, but even so, who retains these information. In this way, my “hack” accidentally reveals how technologies can reinforce existing social hierarchies and educational inequalities.

LF