Seeing Like a Spreadsheet
Summary
David Oks traces the spreadsheet’s ascent from VisiCalc to Excel and argues that the tool reshaped American business by turning numbers into a universal language for management and finance. The piece links the spreadsheet to the rise of Wall Street, private equity, and the modern corporation, and looks ahead to how AI might further reframe organizations by making workflows legible and automatable, while warning about dehumanization and over-reliance on quantification.