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.
The Future of US Democracy: Getting Excessive Money Out of Elections
Excessive money in political elections corrodes the democratic process by distorting representation, undermining public trust, and prioritizing the interests of wealthy donors over the common good. Efforts to reduce the influence of money in politics aim to promote greater transparency, accountability, and fairness in the political process. Addressing the issue of money in politics requires a combination of legal challenges, legislative reforms, grassroots activism, and civic engagement to create a more equitable and democratic political system.
Public and Private Goods: Social and Policy Implications
In a previous related posts, I wrote about how digital content and services can be considered “misbehaving economic goods” because most don’t conform to the standard product that is individually owned and consumed in its entirety. In this post, I expand that analysis to a wider continuum of different types of public and private goods. […]
Technostructural Stages of Global ICT for Development (ICT4D)
This post explores and outlines the following stages or phases of economic and social development utilizing information and communications technologies. The ICT acronym has emerged as a popular moniker, especially in international usage, for the digital technology revolution and is often combined with “development” to form ICT4D.
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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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