Poovey, Giddens, and Goody on the Signficance 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.
Spreadsheets and the Modern Fact made Operational
Spreadsheets are the modern fact made operational. They inherit the rhetorical power of double-entry bookkeeping, extend it through computation, and enforce it through synchronization. To understand spreadsheet capitalism, is not to reject numbers, but to remember that their authority was built, not given.
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.
Global Liquidity Theory and the SACT Layers
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jan 19) Global Liquidity Theory and the SACT Layers. apennings.com https://apennings.com/technologies-of-meaning/global-liquidity-theory-and-the-sact-layers/ Introduction How does financial liquidity impact financial markets, asset prices, and geopolitical stability in the emerging context of an AI-driven political economy? Using my SACT (Substitution, Abstraction, Symbolic Computing, and Telecommunications Synchronization) layers framework, I’ll explore how […]
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.
Telecom Synchronization in Spreadsheet Capitalism
Telecom provides the connectivity through which the abstractions of finance become actionable and enforceable. Spreadsheet capitalism’s synchronization logic operates through its three stratified but interdependent layers: physical, network, and value-added, which provide the architecture of global monetary coordination.
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 […]
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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@gmail.com
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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