Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jan 03) The SACT Attack: How Spreadsheet Capitalism Conquered the World. apennings.com https://apennings.com/democratic-political-economies/the-sact-attack-how-spreadsheet-capitalism-conquered-the-world/

The modern world was not conquered by force of arms, nor even by ideology alone, but by a quieter and more durable weapon that facilitated unique ways of seeing, representing, calculating, and coordinating. This weapon been the major armament of the global financial system that now spans hundreds of countries and involves trillions of US dollars (USD) and other forms of modern wealth. It rests on a historically layered techno-epistemology so profoundly embedded in the modern world that it seems quiet, objective, stealthy, and even inevitable.

This technological framework can be understood through four mutually reinforcing capabilities: Substitution, Abstraction, Symbolic Computing, and Telecommunications Synchronization (SACT). These come together in the modern digital spreadsheet “logic” and the globally connected gridmatic screens. At the heart of this achievement lies a powerful, interactive human-knowledge framework that has quietly underwritten what I call “spreadsheet capitalism,” a central thrust for the modern global political economy.

The “SACT attack” is not an event but a condition. It names the historical convergence through which older media technologies, mathematical notation, and networked communication fused into a digital technology that renders the world’s political economy as a grid of interchangeable values and mobilized capital.

The assault did not arrive with a bang, nor with the rumble of tanks across a border. The conquest of the modern world was silent, illuminated early by the cool, green glow of a cathode ray tube, then by multiple high-definition screens of financial news and transacting terminals. The SACT attack was a techno-epistemological coup d’état that upset the world of open-outcry trading pits, tacit trading reflexes, and telephone/telex communication. It reorganized the planet, not according to geography or ideology, but according to the fintech logic of the visual grid, increasingly tied together with clouds of datasets.

In the process called “remediation,” new media integrate older forms of established media.[1] Spreadsheet capitalism is based on the remediation of historical numerical and media practices into the modern digital spreadsheet. These include Indo-Arabic numerals (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.9) with the zero (0) and a base-10 decimal system within a positional place-value notation (1,000). Media include vertical columns and horizontal rows drawing on the political/military use of lists, and extensive 2-D visual tables used for tabulating corporate and national wealth. The digital spreadsheet uses intersected cells with Unicode multilanguage inscription, and connects data in separate cells with symbolic formulas.[1a]

These came together into a new techno-knowledge that reshaped modern financial and organizational processes. But the world did not simply stumble into this global coordination; it built epistemological authority on established practices like double-entry bookkeeping and statistics. It built on the information tools shaped since the telegraph and its need for “data processing.” It also built related accounting and financial knowledge in business schools, and statistics in science and social science education. Many formulas came from engineering.

This techno-knowledge empowered Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe,” the bond traders, the quants, the central bankers who run the world’s financial system in his (1987) Bonfire of the Vanities.[2] They did not invent their tools from scratch. Instead, they drew on remediated technology some of which thousands of years of media practices into a single, lethal interface: the digital spreadsheet terminal. The “masters” used this technology to create a global system of digitally-enabled, and increasingly blockchain-connected financial system. They used it to create new debt and credit instruments that registered, loaned, and traded hundreds of trillions of dollars. They developed a computing alchemy that resulted in an endlessly recomputable, instantaneously synchronized, and globally enforceable system for coordinating the accumulation of organizational and national wealth.

This post continues a story of how spreadsheet capitalism came to govern our working reality by quietly reorganizing finance, governance, and global “time-space power.”[3] It is a narrative that frames SACT not as a conspiracy or a single technology, but as a historically layered techno-epistemological trajectory that has quietly reorganized finance, governance, and power. I’ve kept the tone critical but analytic, grounding the argument in media history and the remediation of previous tools in modern technology rather than moral panic, and explicitly linking spreadsheets, PCs, and financial terminals to the production of economic and social power.

Substitution Replaces the World with Tokens

At the foundation of spreadsheet capitalism lies substitution. The SACT epistemology recognizes that the physical world is messy, heavy, and slow. To manage it, one must replace particulars with a signifier, sometimes called a token, usually a number or a word. This process is the replacement of concrete physical goods, people, social relationships, and lived time with symbolic stand-ins. Under the spreadsheet’s logic, a house is no longer a shelter made of brick and wood; it is replaced by a cell entry containing a “Mortgage-Backed Security” (MBS) value. A barrel of oil is not fuel; it is a futures contract.

Substitution is the first step toward constituting and coordination of meaning. Because meaning is difficult to “fix” and police, the spreadsheet provides a structural framework, drawing on historical information practices, to organize it. Digital spreadsheets remediate centuries-old writing techniques such as tallies, ledgers, and double-entry bookkeeping into a system where economic reality becomes divisible, legible, portable, and actionable. Assets become rows, contracts become entries, and future commitments become manageable obligations.

This logic draws on a long lineage of media practices: tallies, ledgers, double-entry bookkeeping. But digital spreadsheets remediate these earlier forms into a system where substitution is total and reversible. Anything that can be named can be assigned a cell; anything in a cell can be copied, moved, or deleted. Items in cells can be integrated into functions and formulas.

The signifier (the number) didn’t just represent the signified (the asset); it replaced it. The “Masters of the Universe” stopped looking at the world and started looking at the screen. Money has always done this, but the spreadsheet radicalizes the process. Assets become rows. Columns become categories. People become accounts. Futures become discounted cash flows.

In this SACT regime, land is substituted by real estate securities, labor by productivity metrics, risk by volatility measures, and governance by compliance checklists. The spreadsheet does not merely represent reality, it becomes the operational reality within which decisions are made.

Abstraction Erases Friction by Detaching Context

Substitution alone is insufficient without abstraction. The power of spreadsheet capitalism lies in its ability to strip away context while preserving calculability. Abstraction sacrifices meaning for a gain in interoperability. This process is anchored in Indo-Arabic numerals, including zero, base-10 decimals, and positional place-value notation. These notational, signifying systems, remediated into digital form, allow quantities to expand exponentially and be manipulated independently of their origins. Time, risk, and obligation are flattened into comparable units. Abstraction allows value to be detached from local contingencies and made globally comparable.

Abstraction enables scale. It allows financial instruments to circulate globally, detached from the political, ecological, or social conditions that produced them. In the spreadsheet, all debt looks the same. A dollar of debt in Detroit becomes commensurable with a dollar of debt in Jakarta. Abstraction allows billions of participants to operate within a shared economic language. The spreadsheet is the machine that performs this abstraction millions of times per second, without fatigue or reflection.

Symbolic Computing Formulates Judgment and Power

With the world substituted and abstracted, symbolic computing takes over. Through formulas and algorithms, cells began to talk to each other. The spreadsheet is not a static paper ledger; it is a computational environment. This capability remediates centuries of mathematical reasoning and accounting practice into programmable logic. Symbolic computing is the engine of the SACT attack.

Once quantities are encoded numerically and placed into cells, formulas can act upon them. What appears as a neutral function in formulas like NPV(), VAR(), and correlation matrices becomes a crystallized theory of the world and its future. Assumptions about growth, risk, and rationality are embedded in code, repeated automatically, and rarely questioned. Formulas remediate earlier practices of calculation, accounting, and statistical reasoning, but they do so with unprecedented speed and authority due to the availability of microprocessing “compute.”

These spreadsheet formulas rose to prominence during the leveraged buyout (LBO) period of the 1980s, when they were used to break down and sell off some of the largest corporations in the US. Spreadsheets had a paper-based life before the digital spreadsheet, but the speed and interactivity of the personal computer made spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 the “killer apps” that often justified the purchase of the new information machines. The results of spreadsheet formulas convinced investment banks to lend short-term loans to “raiders” who would buy up companies, sell off parts to repay the loans, and keep a substantial profit.

IF, VLOOKUP, and SUMPRODUCT commands allowed the spreadsheet to simulate possible futures. “If interest rates rise by 0.5%, then the value of Cell D12 drops by 40%.” This computational power allows the creation of “synthetic” value, an artificial construct that mirrors the value or performance of a real-world asset or dataset without direct ownership. Money could be begotten of money, without ever “touching the ground.” The positional place-value notation meant that shifting a decimal point, adding a zero, or applying a leverage formula could conjure trillions of dollars of notional value.

Symbolic computing turns finance into a self-referential system. Models generate prices that validate models. Risk systems define what counts as risk. The spreadsheet becomes an epistemic enclosure, as what cannot be symbolically computed effectively ceases to exist.

Spreadsheets do not replace human judgment; they amplify it. Symbolic computing transforms abstraction into action, a process called semiosis. Once values are encoded numerically and organized into cells, formulas can operate on them, enabling automated calculation, forecasting, and optimization. They allow institutions to model scenarios, manage risk, and allocate resources at speeds and with consistency that would otherwise be impossible.

We face a situation in which symbolic computing completes the abstraction process by automating reasoning. Judgment migrates from human deliberation to computational execution. (SACT)AI in another post examines the influence of AI on symbolic computing and the other layers of spreadsheet capitalism. It addresses the future of human action and computation in global finance, particularly through inference from a wide range of data scanned, scraped, and scrubbed from the World Wide Web and other sources of crowdsourcing and sensing from the Internet of Things (IoT).

Telecommunications Synchronization through the Global Grid

The final component of the SACT stack is telecommunications synchronization. A spreadsheet is powerful in isolation; it becomes world-shaping when synchronized across global networks. Fiber-optic cabling, Earth-orbiting satellites, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and financial terminals ensure that the same abstractions appear simultaneously in New York, London, Singapore, and São Paulo.

This synchronization remediates the telegraph, the ticker tape, the telex, and the newspaper into a real-time global ledger of financial terminals that computes data and news into trading algorithms. Prices, yields, and positions update continuously, enforcing a single temporal regime: market time. Local rhythms, such as ecological cycles, labor schedules, and democratic deliberations, are subordinated to synchronized global financial clocks.

Telecommunications transforms spreadsheets from terminal tools into network infrastructures. They allow assets and liabilities to circulate instantly, anchoring global trade and debt. Network effects come into play favoring the Bloomberg terminal, but also the US dollar that operates prominently in the current spreadsheet logic as the absolute relative value in most calculations. As a result, the spreadsheet-enabled trade system has facilitated the USD becoming the major solution for global liquidity and wealth storage.

Telecom facilitates the time-space power of spreadsheet capitalism. Money can flow from a pension fund in California to a construction project in Dubai and back to a hedge fund in the Caymans in seconds. This speed eliminates the ability for human reflection. The market became a “real-time” entity, reacting to news before it was humanly understood.

The Masters of the Universe and the Dollar Grid

Together, SACT forms the epistemic back the bone of modern spreadsheet capitalism. It empowers Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe.” This honor was bestowed not because they are uniquely intelligent, but because they operate fluently as the high priests of this symbolic regime.

The spreadsheet is transformed from a tool into a global infrastructure. Fiber optics and satellites synchronize financial data in real-time across the globe (New York, London, Tokyo), enforcing a single “market time” that overrides local rhythms. This speed prevents human reflection and solidifies the US Dollar as the absolute relative value in global calculations.

The global financial system serves as a meta-layer over the physical world. In this “gridmatic” infrastructure, hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt and derivatives hover above the planet’s actual GDP. With spreadsheets, terminals, and synchronized networks, financial elites constructed a global system of USD-enabled trade, credit, derivatives, and shadow banking that now exceeds the size of the real economy by an order of magnitude. Hundreds of trillions of dollars in obligations circulate as abstractions, enforceable through legal, technical, and monetary power.

This is not merely commodity or fiat money; it is spreadsheet money: money whose legitimacy derives from internal and networked consistency within symbolic systems rather than from social consensus or material backing alone.

This synchronization remediates the telegraph, the ticker tape, the telex, and the newspaper into a real-time global ledger of financial terminals that computes data and news into trading algorithms. Prices, yields, and positions update continuously, enforcing a single temporal regime: market time. Local rhythms, such as ecological cycles, labor schedules, and democratic deliberations, are subordinated to synchronized global financial clocks.

Telecommunications transforms spreadsheets from terminal tools into network infrastructures. They allow assets and liabilities to circulate instantly, anchoring global trade and debt. Network effects come into play, favoring the Bloomberg terminal, but also the US dollar that operates prominently in the current spreadsheet logic as the absolute relative value in most calculations. As a result, the spreadsheet-enabled trade system has facilitated the USD becoming the major solution for global liquidity and wealth storage.

Telecom facilitates the time-space power of spreadsheet capitalism. Money can flow from a pension fund in California to a construction project in Dubai and back to a hedge fund in the Caymans in seconds. This speed eliminates the ability for human reflection. The market became a “real-time” entity, reacting to news before it was humanly understood.

Conclusion: An Insidious Epistemology

The modern world has been reshaped not by military force, but by a quiet, techno-epistemological “coup d’état” that I call the spreadsheet capitalism.[] It represents the SACT’s victory of the digital organizational grid over the chaotic reality of the physical world. By fusing remediation of numerical, mathematical, and writing tools with modern telecommunications, the digital spreadsheet has constructed a global “gridmatic” reality where the ability to substitute, abstract, compute, and synchronize data equates to power over human, financial, and material resources.

This system has done more than merely optimize finance; it has created an epistemic enclosure where only that which can be counted and computed is acknowledged as real. As we move toward an era of AI-driven symbolic computing, the “Masters of the Universe” no longer just read the markets; they operate the operating system of the planet itself, creating a world where time, space, and value are defined by the logic of the cell, the table, and the formula.

The danger of the SACT attack lies not in malice but in invisibility innovation, and performance. Spreadsheet capitalism presents itself as rational, objective, and technical, while quietly reshaping what can be known, valued, and governed. Political choices appear as technical constraints. Ethical questions dissolve into optimization problems. Because the digital spreadsheet remediates older media so seamlessly, it feels familiar, inevitable, and even boring. Numbers, language, tables, formulas combine Yet its scale, speed, and synchronization have no historical precedent.

To name the SACT stack is not to reject computation or coordination, but to recognize that the modern financial order is built on specific media choices, not universal truths. Understanding the SACT attack opens space for alternative epistemologies such as forms of accounting that re-embed context, slow synchronization, and the restoration of human judgment. Without such interventions, the grid will continue to expand, substituting the world with symbols until the symbols themselves are all that remain.

Notes

[1] Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Exploring spreadsheet technology through the lens of “remediation,” where older media forms are incorporated into newer ones gives us additional insights about their capabilities and effectiveness. Financial news, for instance, remediates print (textual data) and speech (anchors) within the televisual medium, which itself now incorporates web techniques and enables programming like Bloomberg TV and CNBC. Two key concepts from Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation are the logics of transparent immediacy and hypermediation. The first strategy aims to make the medium itself disappear, offering an immersive, seemingly unblemished, and “authentic” experience of the reality being presented. In financial news, this is partly achieved through the authoritative presence of news anchors who guide narratives and conduct live interviews, fostering a sense of direct access to information and expertise. “Breaking News” segments and live reports further enhance this feeling of immediacy. Conversely, the hypermediation strategy foregrounds the medium by integrating multiple data streams, windows, charts, graphs, and scrolling tickers – reminiscent of a computer interface or sports “datatainment.” This approach offers an augmented, quantitative view of the world, drawing on the perceived truth of numeracy and remediating tools like spreadsheets. Financial news relies heavily on this, displaying a constant flow of stock prices, commodity values, and economic indicators.
[1a]Unicode replaced ASCI that remediated British banking penmanship trained for legible ledgers. British banking penmanship historically favored clear, legible cursive styles like Copperplate (English Roundhand) for formal business and financial documents.
[2] Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” is from his Bonfire of the Vanities novel that was also turned into a motion picture. It was about a bond trader whose world comes crashing down after a hit and run accident.
[3] Giddens, Anthony. (1983) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). p 117.
Giddens, A. (1983) The Nation-State and Violence. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). These two volumes were particularly influential in my graduate work theorizing digital money. Also see my analysis with Patrick Rose of spreadsheets in organizations.
[4] I developed the SACT layers – substitution, abstraction, symbolic computing, and telecommunications synchronization to construct an understanding of “spreadsheet capitalism” that now governs much of our economic reality. It was a term I heard from my mentor Majid Tehranian during the 1980s. Prof. Tehranian was an Iranian who fled before the theocratic regime took power in 1979 and was a professor at the University of Hawaii at the time.
Prompt: Construct a narrative about the “SACT attack” on the modern world. Describe how Substitution, Abstraction, Symblic computing, and Telecommunications synchronization (SACT), the foundations of spreadsheet capitalism have combined to introduce an insidious techno-epistemology shaping modern financial practices. Based on the remediation of historical media practices into the modern digital spreadsheet (Indo-Arabic numerals with the zero and base-10 decimal system within a positional place-value notation, unicode language capability, lists, tables, cells, and formulas) this technology has empowered the ‘masters of the universe” to create a global system of USD-enabled trade and debt that has extended into hundreds of trillions of dollars.

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Not to be considered financial advice.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI and broadband policy. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

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Category: artificial intelligence, blockchain, data analytics and meaning, democratic political economies, digital destruction, digital geography, digital media economics, dystopian economies, enabling frameworks, enterprise systems, financial news, financial technology, geopolitical risk, global communications, meaning makers, public administration, smart new deal, spreadsheet logic, strategic communications, sustainable development, telegraphic political economy
Tags: Abstraction > remediation theory > SACT > Substitution > Symbolic computing > Telecommunications Synchronization

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