The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets

This has a lot in common with science fiction, a genre full of thought experiments that ask Heinlein's famous three questions:

What if?
If only, and

If this goes on…

These contrafactuals are incredibly useful and important. As critical tools, science fiction's parables about the future are the best chance we have for resisting the inevitabilism that insists that technology must be used in a certain way, or must exist at all. Science fiction doesn't just interrogate what the gadget does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

One of science fiction's key methods comes from sf grandmaster Theodore Sturgeon: "ask the next question." Ask a question, then ask "what happens next?" Do it again, and again, and again: