When the Fed Speaks, Global Spreadsheets Reformulate the Future
The modern world economy operates as a synchronized symbolic computation system. A rate cut, therefore, triggers not a single reaction but billions of linked recalculations occurring simultaneously across financial terminals such as the Bloomberg Terminal, BlackRock’s Aladdin, LSEG’s Workspace, and the Wind Information Terminal. The moment the announcement appears, spreadsheet logic activates globally.
Poovey, Giddens, and Goody on the Significance of Double-Entry Book-Keeping for the Modern Economy
Poovey’s account is more deconstructive, exposing how balance rhetorically depoliticizes economic knowledge (aligning with critical histories of facticity), whereas Giddens’s is more reconstructive, treating bookkeeping as an enabling infrastructure for modernity’s dynamic time-space power without deeply interrogating its ideological masking function. Together, they illuminate how the SACT Stack’s foundational “balance” operates as both a rhetorical/epistemological achievement (Poovey) and a temporal-storage/power mechanism (Giddens), sustaining the apparent objectivity and global synchronization of spreadsheet capitalism’s endless ledgers.
The Ghost in the Grid: Interpretants and Calculable Traces in Spreadsheet Capitalism
The spreadsheet, as a computational medium, transforms heterogeneous material realities into standardized symbolic inscriptions. To understand this transformation, semiotic theory offers two powerful but distinct conceptual tools: Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of the interpretant and Jacques Derrida’s concept of the trace. While Peirce emphasizes the generative continuity of meaning through interpretive mediation, Derrida foregrounds the structural absence and deferral that inhabit all signification. Taken together, these frameworks illuminate how the numbers and letters populating financial spreadsheets function as representations of the messy, contingent world.
The SACT Attack: How Spreadsheet Capitalism Conquered the World
Once Substitution is complete, the other layers of SACT can take over. You cannot apply Abstraction (comparing unlike things), Symbolic Computing (formulas), or Telecommunications (speed) to a physical house. But you can apply all of them to the token of the house sitting in a spreadsheet cell.
Spreadsheet Knowledge and Production of the “Modern Fact”
Poovey’s book provides a critical background and framework for understanding how certain forms of knowledge became authoritative and seemingly “objective.” She argued that the rise of double-entry bookkeeping and statistical sciences in the early modern period was not merely a technical advancement but a profound epistemological shift. These systems created a new way of seeing and organizing the world through numerical representation, presenting complex realities as quantifiable and manageable facts.
Will BRICS Effectively Tokenize Rare Earth Elements to Back a New Currency?
Rose Mason in Medium makes a compelling plea for the tokenization of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) currently in high demand around the world. From another angle, Cyrus Janssen presents an intriguing but ultimately flawed argument that the BRICS+ countries will use REEs to back a new currency to challenge the US dollar.[1] This post examines […]
Peirce and Derrida on the Logic and Power of Spreadsheets and Dashboards
The growing ubiquity of spreadsheets, dashboards, and AI models across organizational life marks a shift in how meaning, decision-making, and authority are structured. These systems do not simply reflect reality or suggest more than an increase in computational capability. These techniques construct reality symbolically, substituting formulas, predictions, and metrics for presence, memory, and deliberation. This […]
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.
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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
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anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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