How USD Infrastructure Became the West’s Sanctions Engine
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Oct 04) How USD Infrastructure Became the West’s Sanctions Engine. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/how-usd-infrastructure-became-the-wests-sanctions-engine/ Introduction The USD global infrastructure, encompassing onshore US dollars and the offshore Eurodollar market, remains the central organizing pillar of global commerce and finance. Its success stems not from coercion but from immense liquidity, deep capital […]
The Computerization of Society Revisited: French Social Theory and the Geopolitics of Information and Data Centers in the Age of AI
Nora and Minc concluded that the only way to prevent France from being subjugated by American computing conglomerates was for the state to build and regulate the national telecommunications infrastructure, ensuring that the informational grid remained a public utility rather than a corporate monopoly.
Why SACT Logic is the Operational Core of Tokenization
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 31) Why SACT Logic is the Operational Core of Tokenization. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/digital-monetarism/why-sact-logic-is-the-operational-core-of-tokenization/ Introduction Last summer, I was reviewing a paper on digital spreadsheets and time-space power that had been rejected by a journal and decided a term I used, “substitution,” needed elaboration. It led to my conceptualization, […]
The US Stablecoin Pipeline: Funding the Core, Supplying the Periphery
The significance of the GENIUS Act therefore extends well beyond cryptocurrency regulation. It creates the legal foundation for a new international payment architecture in which Treasury-backed digital dollars circulate globally through smartphones and over blockchains rather than correspondent banks. This architecture has the potential to reduce one of the most persistent constraints on development. That is the limited access to reliable dollar liquidity.
Neutralizing the Milkshake Effect in SACT-AI Bancor/ICU Monetary Coordination
SACT-AI transforms the milkshake effect from an extractive force into a managed, symmetric flow. USD shortages are neutralized because liquidity is generated within the Bancor ledger rather than being pulled from peripheral markets.
Reviewing the New Deal’s Global Political Economy Framework and Its Current Challenges
This blog post argues for reclaiming January 6th as the anniversary of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech (1941) rather than the date of the Capitol attack. The post traces the arc from FDR’s “Global New Deal” to the modern digital financial order.
Situating Gold in the Substitution-Computational-Telecom Stack of Global Finance
This post explains that in the modern financial system, gold no longer functions as a currency but as a powerful symbolic asset within the dollar-anchored framework of “spreadsheet capitalism.” Its physical form is replaced by the digital symbol XAUUSD, which represents abstract concepts like “safe-haven,” “inflation hedge,” and “geopolitical insurance.” This symbol is integrated into the global economy through a Semiotic-Computational-Telecom (SCT) stack.
Reprogramming Spreadsheet Capitalism for Climate Resilience
In the framework of spreadsheet capitalism, capital no longer exists solely as a tangible asset, productive relation, or factor of industrial production—it is reconstituted as a symbolic, programmable logic embedded in and animated by digital spreadsheets. Drawing on a semiotic-computational framework, this transformation reveals how capital is not simply represented in spreadsheets but reborn through symbolic substitution, abstract modeling, and procedural calculation.
keep looking »Categories
Referencing this Material
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
About me
Writings by Category
- ai4d
- artificial intelligence
- automatrix
- blockchain
- books and films
- characteristics of digital media
- creative cities
- creative industries
- crisis communications
- cryptocurrencies
- cultural Industries
- data analytics and meaning
- democratic political economies
- digital coordination
- digital destruction
- digital geography
- digital media economics
- digital media management
- digital monetarism
- digital spreadsheets
- disaster risk management
- disruption
- dystopian economies
- educational innovations
- electric money
- enabling frameworks
- enterprise systems
- financial news
- financial technology
- food policy and security
- futurists
- geopolitical risk
- global communications
- global e-commerce
- health IT
- how IT came to rule the world
- intellectual property
- journalism
- meaning makers
- meaningful play
- media strategies
- mobile technologies
- multimedia
- political economies in sf
- political economy of media
- public administration
- science and technology studies
- sensing technologies
- smart new deal
- social media
- space systems
- spreadsheet logic
- strategic communications
- sustainable development
- technologies of meaning
- technology management
- telecom policy and net neutrality
- telegraphic political economy
- telelearn/telework
- the cold war
- the smith effect
- uncategorized
- visual literacy and rhetoric
