The Message in the Bottle: Voyagers, Radioactive Heat, and the Golden Record
Launched by NASA in 1977, the Voyager mission was originally engineered as a narrow, technical expedition to photograph the outer planets of our solar system. However, as the probes transcended their original parameters and escaped into interstellar space, they transformed.
How Spreadsheet Logic Became the Foundation of Artificial Intelligence, Part 1
AI shifts the locus of coordination from representation to autonomous execution. When integrated with decentralized technologies like blockchain or distributed cloud environments, advanced AI agents do not merely suggest alternatives on a screen, they orchestrate real-time interactions across global networks.
Blockchains as the Telecom Substrate of a SACT-AI Bancor/ICU System
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jun 26) Blockchains as the Telecom Substrate of a SACT-AI Bancor/ICU System. apennings.com https://apennings.com/characteristics-of-digital-media/from-wires-to-ledgers-blockchains-as-the-telecommunications-substrate-of-a-sact-ai-bancor-icu-system/ Introduction In a SACT-AI Bancor / International Clearing Union (ICU) system, blockchains are not merely financial ledgers, they function as the synchronization layer of the global economy. It is a new kind of telecom […]
Marshall McLuhan and the Age of the LLM: The Medium is the Prompt
By outsourcing the labor of synthesis, drafting, and dialectical reasoning to an external electronic oracle, we are rewriting our internal cognitive architecture. The spreadsheet turned the economy into a quantitative model; the LLM is turning culture itself into an automated, editable simulation.
The Conversational Oracle: A Tetrad Analysis of Artificial Intelligence
By restructuring the primary human interface into a conversational dialogue, AI has fundamentally altered the grammar of knowledge acquisition. Humans no longer navigate static databases; they consult an omnipresent, animistic interlocutor for interpretation, foresight, and meaning. This secondary computational orality satisfies a deep-seated human desire for unmediated guidance, yet it introduces a profound structural vulnerability. The oracle we converse with is inherently a “black box,” masking hyper-complex statistical probabilities as authoritative truth.
McLuhan’s Media Tetrad Applied to Digital Spreadsheet Logic and the Introduction of AI
Unlike approaches that focus only on the intended uses of technology, the tetrad examines how media reshape human perception, social organization, and power relations through four interconnected questions.
Everything Counts in Large Amounts
We have now reached a point where the sheer volume of global financial transactions exceeds human cognitive capacity. Trillions of dollars in high-frequency trading, automated supply chains, and Eurodollar networks move too quickly for human mediation.
How Spreadsheet Logic became the Foundation of AI, Part 2
Long before modern AI models were trained on billions of parameters, the fundamental architecture of human data organization was already being perfected in the humble spreadsheet. Spreadsheets taught computers how to organize the world into clean math. AI took that math, abstracted it, and used it to map the messiness of human reality.
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About Me
Professor (full) at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Research Professor for Stony Brook University. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and global political economy
You can reach me at:
anthony.pennings@gmail.com
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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