A spreadsheet is a war of attrition

Something I'll start writing about more here — so that you'll keep me accountable, if nothing else — is that I'm starting to write a book.

Specifically, I'm starting to write a book about spreadsheets, and what they are, and what they can do. I've been trying to isolate what specifically I'm drawn to in this subject, and just now my partner pulled up this talk with Sir Grayson Perry. When talking about his process, he said (paraphrasing), "I'm not one of these artists who comes in with an effortless line. My art is more like a war of attrition." In Perry's art, that lust for war comes from his love of outsider art, and building up a piece of art through painstaking little steps of process and craft, rather than effortlessly falling into something. And this will sound crazy, but:

When I was making video games in spreadsheets, using only built-in functions, it wasn't intended to be a showcase of my own technical mastery; kind of the opposite, actually. What I wanted to do (best laid plans and all that) was show what could be built up from a modest and boring starting place if you pour enough time and careful thought into it. It was a million tiny knife strokes in code instead of paint, unobscured by the final piece.

That last part is just as important to me: when you as the user want to learn how a "good" spreadsheet works, those answers are there for you in the piece itself. That makes it a unique artform from apps or AI slop or any of the million bits of corporate code we interact with now, which hide their true forms away from you like that Simpsons meme where Homer's pinned all his fat back with chip clips and hair ties. We can't learn anything from those, because they resist being learned. But a spreadsheet bares its scars in the open for you, and there's something poetic and lovely about that that I want to share with you.

Anyway, so that's what the book's about. Stay tuned.