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.
Stablecoins, SACT-AI, and the Future of Global Liquidity for Sustainable Development
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Apr 28) Stablecoins, SACT-AI, and the Future of Global Liquidity for Sustainable Development. apennings.com https://apennings.com/political-economy-of-media/stablecoins-sact-ai-and-the-future-of-global-liquidity-for-sustainable-development/ Introduction The impending implementation of Treasury-backed stablecoins suggests a the onset of a profound shift in the architecture of global finance. What appears, at first glance, to be a technical innovation in digital […]
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.
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 Global “Balance Sheet” in Spreadsheet Capitalism
Spreadsheet capitalism builds a global balance sheet by transforming the world into a synchronized, computable set of claims. Through substitution, abstraction, symbolic computing, and telecommunications grids, it creates a system in which liquidity governs outcomes and balance sheets define possibility.
Excel vs. Java: Two Languages, Two Worlds of Thought: Symbolic Grid vs. Algorithmic Script
Excel and Java embody two distinct computing traditions — the grid-born, spatial logic of accounting versus the engineered, algorithmic logic of software — each transformed the world in its own domain.
Moving Economic and Financial Curves
I’ve previously written about how the historical development of “one price” and equillibrium changed political economy to economics due to the development of market graphs. In these visualizations that empowered a new economics, supply and demand curves intersect at a “market clearing” price where suppliers and buyers of a good or service are happy to […]
Markets and Prices: Pros, Cons
This post looks a how the notion of markets emerged and what is useful and determental about them. It discusses the underlying economic understanding of markets and includes several critiques of this term and our allegiance to them.
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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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