The Rise of the Spreadsheet Brainlet

Modernity as Weaponised Asperger's Syndrome

I recently listened to

Walt Bismarck

and

Bentham's Bulldog

debate utilitarianism. When they started discussing the difference between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism, I had flashbacks to the Talmudic torture I endured as a philosophy undergrad.

I grew up in Melbourne, the birthplace of effective altruism. I studied at the Singer Supremacy Institute. I wasted three years of my life debating trolley problems. So hearing the words 'act' and 'rule' in the same sentence brought back some painful memories for me.

I was once very enthusiastic about both utilitarianism and my philosophy degree. One of my first lecturers was covered in satanic tattoos and had long black hair. He’d been arrested for breaking into a factory farm in order to expose the horrendous things going on inside. In class, he’d casually share tips on how to do this without getting caught. He and Peter Singer inspired me to become a vegetarian—and, for a brief time, vegan.

This lecturer was eventually replaced by a more milquetoast Singerstan, who would rehash the same talking points ad nauseam. As he droned on about the trolley problem, I found myself contemplating one of my own: If I strangled him to death, would the net increase in student happiness justify the act?

This essay is a screed against utilitarianism. My critique will be aesthetic, rather than ethical. I will argue that utilitarians are autistic spreadsheet brainlets who have created an optimized but ultimately ugly world. 

Jeremy Bentham and the REEEasoning Behind Utilitarianism

The spreadsheet brain has a genealogy, and it starts with a reclusive Englishman.

Jeremy Bentham was the father of utilitarianism. He was also a major autismo. John Stuart Mill said that he lacked the ”faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself.” The English essayist William Hazlitt put it more bluntly: “He regards the people around him as little more than flies.”

This lack of empathy made it difficult for him to sustain prolonged friendships. But Bentham was too obsessively preoccupied with his niche interests to care about such things. He spent over four decades trying to devise the perfect penitentiary, during which time he barely left his house. To quote Hazlitt again:

He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like a prisoner in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine. He scarcely ever goes out, and sees very little company. 

If Bentham were alive today, he would likely be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. That, at least, is the view of modern scholars Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran. I don’t know if this is true, but if it is, it would help shed light on why utilitarianism resonates with autists.

Effective Autism

According to the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, autists use “a different operating system” to allists. They are more exact, objective and fact-oriented, and less subjective, emotion-oriented or willing to approximate. In other words, they operate more like machines.

Baron-Cohen's operating system metaphor perfectly captures the nature of autistic thinking. Just as computers process inputs through algorithmic logic, autistic minds navigate reality through structured rules. As psychologist A. Snyder notes, "the autistic mind seems to be suited to working algorithmically within a closed system of specified rules."

This algorithmic mindset manifests perfectly in Bentham's utilitarian philosophy. Utilitarianism is a morality algorithm. I mean that quite literally. Bentham created an algorithm, known as the felicific calculus, that evaluates all human action by a single metric: the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. This algorithm turns ethical dilemmas into mathematical equations. A moral person doesn’t need emotional intuition—they need to be skilled in calculating and quantifying utility.

This sort of thinking naturally appeals to spergs because it leverages their inherent strengths. Spergs excel at algorithmic reasoning, but struggle to understand emotional nuance and social intuition. In other words, they understand patterns and things better than people. They are good at systematising, but bad at empathising. In short, they’re spreadsheet brainlets.

Spreadsheet Brain
Ashley Colbey—who coined the term spreadsheet brain—describes it as follows:

There’s a type of guy, sometimes they’re Silicon Valley guys, sometimes they’re just tech bros, but there’s a type of guy out there who is so out of touch with the material world that his thinking, based on total utilitarian rationalism, ends up going to really weird places.

Let’s talk about some of the weird places that “total utilitarian rationalism” goes.

First, it systematically erodes our most fundamental human loyalties. Utilitarians believe that proximity is morally irrelevant. You should care just as much about a starving child in Djibouti as the starving child next door. Location and relationship are irrelevant. You should simply calculate the hedons (units of pleasure) and quantify the dolors (units of pain). If your dollar generates more utility in Djibouti than at home, your moral duty is to send it abroad.

Utilitarians argue that familial love is an emotional bias that clouds your ability to make rational ethical decisions. The true moral actor simply maximizes utility, even if it disadvantages his own family. Walt's guest

Mordechai Ben-Emet

suggested he would sacrifice his own mother to save four African strangers (a position he has since abandoned).

If you’re a spreadsheet brainlet, these calculations make perfect sense. But to a normal human, they’re  insane. Normal people operate within concentric circles of loyalty—family at the center, the anonymous masses at the periphery. Our moral intuition rightly pulls us toward our inner circles rather than treating all seven billion humans as interchangeable utility vessels.

But utilitarian logic doesn't stop at dismantling family ties—it also challenges our deepest taboos. Peter Singer infamously argues that prohibitions against incest and even bestiality are merely irrational biases that crumble under logical scrutiny. If no one is harmed, then what’s the problem?

At university, this argument was prime trolling material. I’d walk into tutorials and scare the hoes by defending incestuous relationships. We don’t discriminate against gay people just because they’re “icky.” Why, then, should incest be any different? If no offspring is produced—so there’s no risk of genetic defects—who’s actually being harmed? After all, the only relevant moral metric is pleasure and pain. #LoveisLove.

It was fun triggering everyone’s disgust impulse, especially the low-openness foids. By the end of the semester, some seriously suspected I was sleeping with my sister. I even used this argument to troll a proselytizing Muslim. I think he wanted to behead me.

To be absolutely clear: I never actually endorsed incest, because unlike the spreadsheet brainlet, I trust my visceral moral intuitions.

Unsurprisingly, those who justify incest often embrace unorthodox relationship structures. For a full breakdown of Effective Altruist dating norms, check out this article by

Ozy Brennan

. But the long and short of it is, Effective Altruists in the Bay Area are really into polyamory. One article estimates that as many as 60% of EAs in the Bay Area are poly.

Caroline Ellison—the prominent effective altruist and now convicted felon—notoriously advocated for romantic arrangements resembling an "imperial Chinese harem." Even Singer (whose grandparents were poly) argues that monogamy increasingly appears anachronistic in the contraceptive era.

The argument goes something like this: in pre-contraceptive times, jealousy served a clear evolutionary purpose by ensuring paternity. But modern birth control renders this concern obsolete. Now you can join a polycule with a Bangladeshi coder without risking unwanted paternal obligations.

Sperg Supremacy

I don't mention these things merely to mock Bay Area autists (though I won’t pretend that isn’t part of it). I'm simply trying to highlight the fact that utilitarianism is at odds with many of our emotional intuitions. If this worldview was confined to Berkeley seminars and Silicon Valley tech bros, it wouldn’t phase me. But utilitarianism is the modus operandi of modernity.

Vincent Lê

describes it as “the new motor of world history.”

Just as we recoil at incest and bestiality, many people instinctively recoil at modernity. They may not be able to articulate exactly why, but they feel—deep in their gut—that something has gone horribly wrong. These feelings are simply dismissed by spreadsheet brainlets. Infant mortality is down, life expectancy is up—by every measurable metric, things have never been better. Facts don't care about your feelings.

But feelings don't care about your facts. You can show all the charts and data in the world, but if people's gut tells them something is deeply wrong, they won't be convinced. And something is deeply wrong. Bentham's algorithmic ethics has relentlessly optimized for measurable outcomes—GDP, literacy rates, life expectancy, disease reduction—while systematically devaluing everything that resists quantification: beauty, community cohesion, cultural continuity, and spiritual fulfillment.

We are living under the tyranny of spreadsheet supremacy, where everything of immeasurable worth has been sacrificed on the excel altar.

Algorithms and Aesthetics

Spreadsheet brainlets are unlikely to be moved by my rhetorical flourishes. Even I began to cringe a little talking about the immeasurability of beauty. So let's approach this in a more—dare I say—calculated way.

Algorithms, by their very nature, optimize only what they can measure. The Twitter algorithm optimizes for engagement metrics—likes, retweets, time spent scrolling—without any regard for the quality of discourse. As a result, the timeline becomes a digital slop trough 

Utilitarianism suffers from the same fundamental flaw. It fixates on utility that can be easily quantified—GDP, life expectancy, literacy rates—while systematically neglecting values that resist measurement.

During his podcast with Walt, Bentham's Bulldog casually admitted to not caring about art.  This indifference follows logically from his worldview. After all, why would you divert precious water to baroque fountains when you could irrigate more crops? Why spend public funds on ornate buildings when plain concrete boxes would serve the same function at lower cost? Why fund the Sistine Chapel when you could feed the hungry?

The utilitarian indifference to aesthetics helps explain the great ugliness of modern cities. Schools resemble warehouses. Churches have been reduced to prefab metal sheds. University campuses have replaced collegiate gothic with brutalist concrete. Apartment high-rises function as vertical human storage containers. All of this has an impeccable utilitarian logic to it. Each design choice maximizes some measurable metric: cost per square foot, maintenance expense, energy efficiency, throughput capacity.

Plato’s Goon Cave

Imagine a vast industrial complex: rows upon rows of pods, each one containing a naked body floating in viscous grey goo. Their faces are frozen in this weird blissed-out look. Thin wires penetrate their mouths, pumping in nutrient paste and carefully calibrated doses of Blissitol-X and Joygasm. Less elegant tubes are inserted on their penis and up their ass.

On the curved inner walls of each pod, high-definition projections of the finest industry piglets can be seen. The performances of Pussy Poundhard, Daniella Deepthroat, and Sally Sucksalot play on an infinite loop. Gray-uniformed technicians wander the aisles, adjusting drip rates and suction power. In the central control room, the Master Algorithm monitors hedonic output and pleasure-per-watt ratios.

Recently, the complex celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Great Abolition—five decades since humanity committed itself fully to the eradication of pain. Since then, humanity has made unprecedented progress.

Hedonic efficiency has surged by 1032%. Daily pleasure duration has expanded from a mere 3.7 hours to a near-continuous 23.9 hours. Resource consumption per pleasure unit has actually decreased during this period—an achievement touted as the crowning technical accomplishment of the program. Life expectancy has leapt from 78.3 years to 112.6 years, with termination now occurring through fellatio overload rather than disease pathology. Neural-scan satisfaction surveys consistently return an unprecedented 99.97% positive response rate.

Pain has been abolished. Pleasure has been maximized. Resource efficiency has been optimized. Every single metric of well-being that can be measured on a spreadsheet has improved. And yet, even the most committed gooncel recoils at this vision.

What rational objection could the consistent utilitarian offer to Plato's Goon Cave?

Some utilitarians might invoke Mill's distinction between "higher" and "lower" pleasures. Mill argued that intellectual satisfaction trumps base physical pleasure. But most people aren't John Stuart Mill. Given the choice between reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or receiving a blowjob, they would unflinchingly choose the latter.

The deeper problem is that Mill's "higher pleasures" inherently defy quantification. How exactly does one measure the utility of aesthetic contemplation? What is the hedon value of a profound philosophical insight? How many units of pleasure are generated by genuine human connection? These experiences resist numerical representation. They will, therefore, be overlooked in favour of things that are easier to quantify, such as GDP per capita.

Conclusion

This isn't just some stupid thought experiment. This is the trajectory that Western Civilization is on. We don't yet inhabit literal pods, but we've already normalized "housing units." Our bodies haven't been plugged into pleasure machines, but our minds have been hijacked by dopamine-traps. We don’t consume nutrient paste, but we do eat ultra-processed slop.

If the reign of the spreadsheet brainlet continues unchallenged, we truly will end up in Plato's Goon Cave. This is the logical endpoint of a civilization governed by spergs. The autistic cognitive architecture—with its fixation on systems, algorithms, and quantifiable metrics—inevitably creates a world stripped of aesthetic value and qualitative judgment. 

This approach to decision making is presented as rational and unbiased. But it actually reflects the biases of autistic people—like Jeremy Bentham—who excel at systemizing but struggle with emotions. This emotional blindspot leads to a civilization that's deeply inhuman. Our cities become more "livable" by statistical measures while growing uglier and more alienating. 

Hazlitt said that Bentham reduced the "mind of man to a machine." This wasn't merely a criticism of Bentham's philosophy—it was a prophecy. Utilitarianism is the operating system of modernity, and under its governance, man is reduced to machina.