Pennings, A.J. (2026, Feb 22) Spreadsheets and the Modern Fact made Operational. apennings.com https://apennings.com/technologies-of-meaning/spreadsheets-and-the-modern-fact-made-operational/

Introduction

Using Mary Poovey’s A History of Modern Fact and its description of the rhetoric of double-entry bookeeping, I review her work and apply it to spreadsheet logic and my SACT layers. SACT layers are Substitution – Abstraction – Symbolic Computing – Telecommunications Synchronization. This “stack” conceptualizes the primary aspects of spreadsheet capitalism and helps us understand its techno-epistemological impact in the world.

Mary Poovey’s work offers one of the most penetrating accounts of how modern economic knowledge came to appear objective, factual, and politically neutral. Her historical analysis of double-entry bookkeeping is especially useful for understanding spreadsheet capitalism and its SACT layers, because it shows that what we now treat as technical accounting practices were originally rhetorical and epistemological innovations developed over time. They were ways of fixing meaning and persuading readers that account numbers could speak truth independently of moral or political judgment and attest to the virtue of a new merchant class in Europe.

This is my second post on Poovey’s contribution. When applied to contemporary spreadsheets, Poovey’s work helps reveal that spreadsheet capitalism is not simply a more efficient continuation of accounting, but the culmination of a centuries-long effort to separate calculation from interpretation, and to naturalize that separation as “fact.”

Poovey’s Facts as a Rhetorical Achievement

Poovey’s central claim is that modern “facts” did not emerge spontaneously from empirical observation. They were produced through specific genres, practices, and techniques that taught readers how to trust certain kinds of statements and calculations while ignoring others. Double-entry bookkeeping, which spread through early modern commerce, played a crucial role in this transformation. It created records that appeared:

– Balanced rather than argumentative
– Mechanical rather than interpretive
– Objective rather than moral

By requiring every entry to have a corresponding counter-entry, bookkeeping generated an internal coherence that seemed to validate itself. The books appeared to “speak the truth” simply because they balanced, not because they represented reality exhaustively or fairly.
This was, for Poovey, a rhetorical triumph. The form of the ledger produced belief.

Double-Entry Bookkeeping as Early Substitution

Viewed through the SACT framework, double-entry bookkeeping was an early and powerful form of substitution. Goods, labor, debts, obligations, and relationships were substituted with numerical entries. Moral questions about fairness, exploitation, or risk were displaced by balances and totals. What mattered was not whether a transaction was less about whether it was just, but whether it was recorded correctly.

Poovey shows that this substitution allowed economic activity to circulate independently of ethical debate. The ledger became a space where social relations were translated into commensurable symbols, laying the groundwork for monetary abstraction. Spreadsheet capitalism inherits this logic but globalizes it.

Abstracting Narrative Accounts to Formal Balance

Poovey emphasizes that early bookkeeping manuals did not eliminate narrative entirely. They disciplined it. Narrative explanations were subordinated to tables, columns, and rules. And eventually even styles of penmanship.

This shift marked a decisive movement toward abstraction. Economic activity was no longer understood primarily through stories of trade or trust, but through formal relations between numbers. In spreadsheet capitalism, abstraction reaches its apex. Entire economies are reduced to cells, ratios, scenarios, and dashboards. Poovey’s insight is that this abstraction does not eliminate judgment; it repackages it. The spreadsheet appears neutral precisely because the interpretive work has already been encoded into its structure.

Abstraction leads to calculative capability. Political stability becomes a variable, climate risk becomes a stress test, and human behavior becomes a probability distribution.

Symbolic Computing: The Automation of Credibility

Double-entry bookkeeping required skilled human judgment to maintain consistency. Spreadsheets automate this requirement. Here, Poovey’s analysis becomes especially relevant. She showed that bookkeeping derived authority from its procedural regularity. Modern spreadsheets extend that authority by embedding procedures directly into formulas and functions.

Symbolic computing completes the rhetorical project Poovey describes. Spreadsheet calculations execute automatically. Errors are flagged algorithmically. Outputs appear authoritative because they are generated without visible intervention. In this environment, credibility no longer attaches to the accountant or the author, but to the system itself. The spreadsheet becomes a self-validating epistemic device.

Telecommunications Synchronization Ends Locally-Situated Accounting

Poovey’s historical actors kept books that were local, periodic, and retrospective. Spreadsheet capitalism eliminates those constraints. Telecommunications synchronization allows ledgers to update in real time across the globe. The “book” is no longer situated in a merchant’s office. It is distributed, continuous, and simultaneous.

This transforms the rhetoric of fact. Facts are no longer settled after the fact; they are produced continuously. Market prices, risk metrics, and balances appear as real-time truths that demand immediate response. What Poovey identified as a rhetorical achievement becomes infrastructural reality.

From Moral Economy to Spreadsheet Fact

Seen together, Poovey’s analysis helps clarify what spreadsheet capitalism achieves across the SACT layers. Substitution removes moral and social content by translating relationships into numbers. Abstraction organizes those numbers into formal systems that appear self-evident. Symbolic computing automates consistency, removing visible human judgment. Telecommunications synchronization enforces simultaneity, making facts feel universal and unavoidable.

The result is a global epistemology in which economic facts appear to exist independently of politics, even as they structure the possibilities of political economy.

Conclusion: Spreadsheets as the Final Form of the Modern Fact

Poovey does not argue that accounting is deceptive. She argues that its authority rests on conventions that are easily forgotten once they become routine. Spreadsheet capitalism represents the moment when those conventions harden into global infrastructure. What began as a persuasive technique becomes a planetary system of coordination. The spreadsheet does not merely record the world. It produces the conditions under which the world can be known and governed.[2]

In this sense, spreadsheets are the modern fact made operational. They inherit the rhetorical power of double-entry bookkeeping, extend it’s calculative capabilities through computation, and enforce it globally through synchronization. To understand spreadsheet capitalism, is not to reject numbers, but to remember that their authority was built over time, not given naturally.

Notes

[1] Poovey, M. (1998). A History of Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. University of Chicago Press.
[2] Kevin McConway, The Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K. Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact:
Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. DataCrítica: International Journal of Critical Statistics, Vol.1, No.1. See https://datacritica.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/book-review-mary-poovey_s-a-history-of-the-modern-fact-problems-of-knowledge-in-the-sciences-of-wealth-and-society.pdf

Prompt: Using Mary Poovey’s A History of Modern Fact and its description of the rhetoric of double-entry bookeeping, review her work and apply it to spreadsheet capitalism and its SACT layers.

© 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, technologies of meaning, visual literacy and rhetoric
Tags: double logic of remediation > Double-entry bookkeeping > Mary Poovey > SACT (Substitution - Abstraction - Symbolic Computing - Telecommunications Synchronization)

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