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.
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 AI Prompter as Auteur? Examining LLM Authorship Through the Lens of Film Theory
I’ve been teaching film classes on and off since graduate school. It has never been my primary focus, but the historical and theoretical depth of film studies intrigued me as well as the technologies and techniques that shape thinking and understanding. I incorporate much of it in my EST 240 – Visual Rhetoric and Information […]
APEC Presentation: Healing the COP (Common Operating Picture) with AI and APIs for Disaster Management
Among the various mechanisms and tools, we focused on the Common Operational Picture (COP) as a mediation tool that can incorporate novel technologies, such as AI and APIs, and create value for disaster leadership in response to climate variance and data variance. COP is a shared, real-time view of operational data for decision-makers, teams, and agencies involved in multi-agency disaster risk reduction operations. By providing up-to-date information through dashboards and alerts, COP supports situational awareness and coordinated action.
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 […]
Visual Rhetoric Analysis of Social Media: YouTube Channels, Hosts, Logos, and the 3Ms
What makes a successful YouTube channel? What meaning-making practices are used to make a channel interesting, or informative, or enjoyable? What story is being told, who is telling it, and how is it being told? How are people making money from it? These are some of the main questions we address in the final project […]
The Framing Power of Digital Spreadsheets
The power of framing in digital spreadsheets arises from the ability to define what data is included, how it is processed by functions or formulas, and the visual or numerical emphasis placed on specific inputs and outcomes. Spreadsheets exert framing power through selecting and prioritizing data, formula logic and embedded assumptions, standardization and norms, simplifying complex realities, and selective presentation of results.
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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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