The electronic spreadsheet might be responsible for all that you love (or hate) about the world
Of all the things that might’ve had the biggest effect on people’s lives…it’s Excel.
Here’s something to ponder: What has Excel done for you?
Maybe it’s helped manage your finances, project for the future, or track your calories — but probably little else. Or at least, little else directly.
However, just behind the scenes of everything lie electronic spreadsheets. They are the real hero of our complicated supply chains and economic instruments. These tally sheets — Excel, its contemporaries and predecessors — have taken us into the modern age, one automated calculation at a time.
So beyond Word, beyond email, beyond PPT’s and Mario is a boring application that doesn’t even try to be cool. Still, the electronic spreadsheet has the coolest history of all software. So what did it actually change about our world?
First, just imagine how it used to be…
It used to be slow, confusing and painful.
A lot of people say: “I don’t know how people got anything done before cell phones.” Well how about before the electronic spreadsheet? The accountants of yesteryear wielded pens and double-entry ledgers, took hours and made mistakes. Things were extremely limited; as a business grew in scale, so did the number of bookkeepers needed to simply keep up with accounts.
But this did begin to change in earnest with the invention of the transistor. Governments and companies in the 1950s began using mainframes and mini-computers from the likes of IBM and the BUNCH to crunch numbers and deliver actionable insights. Big enough companies had their own data processing department. But there still existed major lags in the processing of hard numbers and limits imposed by the bureaucracy and technology of it all. It was a cumbersome process, and hardly wizardly despite its potential.
And then a revolution was put in motion when Dan Bricklin was bored in class and got an idea.
Imagine the year 1978, six years after Pong and six years before the first commercially available cell phone. Dan Bricklin, a computing major from MIT, is in class as part of Harvard Business School. His professor is chalking in a financial model on a blackboard. It consists of columns and rows, creating a table of cells. Formulas and data are being scribbled into the cells.
And this is what Bricklin was bored by: When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table. This was tedious, and Bricklin thought: “If only we had a blackboard where one could erase a number and write a new number in, and everything would recalculate?”
The two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) had just released the Apple II a year prior. Its 8-bit processor and emphasis on user interface practically begged for new applications, and Bricklin knew how to code what he wanted.
So what was the first killer app? A spreadsheet.
Bricklin partnered with Bob Frankston, and the two went ahead to program this idea. Bricklin envisioned something with the characteristics of a fighter jet’s heads up display and the dynamism of a word processor, which Bricklin had experience programming. From an attic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they prototyped the most simplistic versions of their concept, and expanded on this, often tediously testing around bugs that could make for hours and hours of work to fix the simplest problem.
But in 1981, they did it. VisiCalc was an ingenious new tool.
The general public didn’t notice the importance right away; most were still struggling to understand if there was any real importance to the so-called computer revolution. It was difficult to imagine that a slow, expensive grey box with a screen would change the world. The personal computer was so new, there was little to no value proposition the industry could express to convince people that computers were the future. The Apple II was originally promoted as a place to store recipes (pretty lame). And it could draw really bad drawings (hardly revolutionary).
So Bricklin ended up doing the whole computer industry a huge favour, especially Apple and later IBM: He created the first real value proposition for ‘personal computers,’ and the rest is history.
Accountants, engineers, and inventory managers only needed a demo or two to realize the importance of VisiCalc. Business owners showed their understanding with their wallet, dishing out big bucks on computers (the Apple 2 cost the equivalent of $5,130 in 2016 dollars), with the express purpose of seeing how VisiCalc could help their business.
But if you were an accountant in 1981, you might have had mixed feelings when you saw the flashing green and black screen doing your job. Your bread-and-butter role had just been automated. Were you now rendered irrelevant by a machine?
It was soon evident that accountants had in fact become more valuable because of VisiCalc. In a practical sense, they were now wizardly. All of a sudden they had a magic number-crunching machine and were the chiefs of their own data processing divisions. This innovation meant that electronic spreadsheets let businesses play ‘what if’ in real-time. Bosses could call up the accountant and ask: “What if we hired 10 more employees? What if our raw material costs go up 20 percent? What if we expand throughout the region, what can we expect to see happen and what targets do we have to hit?”
Instantaneously, they had hard numbers to play with. And the ‘what if’ became ‘what next,’ guided by the prophecies of spreadsheets. The new tool in the arsenal — first VisiCalc, then Lotus 1–2–3, and eventually Excel — enabled businesses to think big. And think big they did.
Which brings us to why the electronic spreadsheet is responsible for all you love (or hate) about the world
It’s no coincidence that the financial industry became an increasing driver of the economy just after VisiCalc — and the computational revolution it spurred — came to be.
It’s no coincidence that the prominence of electronic spreadsheets was followed by conglomeration, off-shoring, and a completely new stage in capitalism and consumerism.
Electronic spreadsheets allowed for the creation of increasingly complicated systems, which have both benefitted and afflicted us.
The interplay of rows, cells and formulas is used to store data and share it across far distances, facilitating globalization. Spreadsheets are used as dockets for complicated financial products such as securities, facilitating the growth of finance’s economic importance and the expansion of credit. They are used as a tool for a wide variety of things that were once impossible —once limited by the bounds of analogous calculation.
It was quickly discovered that numbers, figures and projections, laid out in ways that connected once unconnected objects and ideas, could coat the world in their own reality. Electronic spreadsheets were tools that could classify and commodify things that once could not be defined.
The hyperreality of spreadsheets
In 1981, Jean Baudrillard wrote his most famous philosophical treatise, Simulacra and Simulation. In it, he detailed “hyperrealities.” Hyperreality, as a term, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. In a hyperreality, what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Hyperrealities are “the maps that precede the territory,” as Baudrillard put it eloquently. Electronic spreadsheets by nature are data maps of a represented reality. They function not only to appraise aspects of reality (draw maps through data), but also as a technology that can shape perceptions into empirical models, and in doing so empower control over the real experiences of people and the resources that support them (redefine reality).
In other words, electronic spreadsheets are meaning-making tools. And as soon as they were unleashed, they started to do just that.
This guy, and that girl
The Reagan Revolution, which started shortly after Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration as U.S. president, was powered by the hyperreality created by electronic spreadsheets.
Reaganomics (and the corresponding Thatchernomics), would have been near-impossible without the technology Bricklin had put in motion. The electronic spreadsheet was there to itemize and measure value, mobilize dormant resources, and place them into the transactional circuits of the global economy, so that the process of mass privatization could take place.
The rollback of the containment of finance during the Reagan administration was met by the rollout of computers and electronic spreadsheets. In near-symbiotic perfection, the two coexisted, making one wonder what was the chicken, and what one was the egg, and whether such a pedantic argument really mattered at all.
As explored in a series of articles by Anthony Pennings, Associate Chair of the Department of Technology and Society at New York University, “Spreadsheet knowledge” gave companies and governments the ability to capture and fix value in monetary terms in a way that could be used by bankers, brokers, corporate raiders and politicians. Spreadsheets enmeshed themselves as definitive of reality and have been used ever since to make decisions. They put “money-capital firmly in the policy saddle,” to borrow a line from Peter Gowan’s Global Gamble.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan
The spreadsheet is not so much a reflective technology (an accurate simulation) as it is a constitutive and productive technology (something that creates its own value). Enron would never have been able to dupe the world about its earnings if it weren’t for the trust spreadsheets had garnered and the value they could create. The 2008 subprime mortgage crisis would never have been so panoramically damaging if it weren’t for securitization processes — powered by spreadsheets — that were too complicated to be vetted by regulators (and the bankers and investors that wielded them probably knew this).
People tend to forget that even the most elegantly crafted spreadsheet is a house of cards, and can collapse. History has many examples of this in action.
Can technology advance to correct the hyperreality it has created?
The problem with spreadsheets boils down to four words: “Garbage in, garbage out.” Erroneous numbers produce erroneous results, which in turn make spreadsheets into simulacra, disconnected from reality. But what if there were no way to input erroneous numbers? Would we then have something beyond hyperreality, and perfectly representative of reality?
The Internet of Things (IoT) and our increasing cloud computing power has theoretically announced the coming of complete, real-time data from sensors that can quantify virtually all aspects of an economy and supply system. Machine learning promises the ability to take this Big Data and produce accurate, valuable insights. Through endlessly iterative processes, a predictive and prescriptive automated future is being built — something beyond the representations of value we have today, where humans use spreadsheets for persuasive reasons just as much as they do as accurate simulations. Will the simulacra we have created through spreadsheets iteratively correct itself into a omniscient map that better reflects reality? Or will this new world send us further into hyperrealities, placing our faith in even more complicated numbers that we can’t hope to comprehend?
It’s a big question.
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Caravan Coop is a digital agency specializing in custom software and web design. This article is one of the technological musings you can find on the company blog.
