mercuriusgeorge

[mercuriusgeorge]

reflections on twitter, the sun, saturn in aquarius, and the coming pluto in aquarius years

seeing twitter slip into a kind of solar death spiral, after falling into the hands of a single hyper-egoic figure, is making me reflect on the past couple years of saturn in aquarius, and the impending ingress of pluto into aquarius.

if leo is all about the symbol of the king, the figurehead around which all things organize, then aquarius, the sign opposing leo, is all about decentralization. it's still "concerned" with the individual, but rather than a single, elevated individual, it's the abstracted individual — seeing the value of each unique spirit that comprises the collective.

the past few years with saturn in aquarius have challenged the structure of social media platforms. if they are centralized entities with executive decision-making, then those decision-makers have to grapple directly with paradoxes and take on responsibility for their choices. the best example in the past few years might be vaccine disinformation. do you prioritize the individual right to free speech or the collective responsibility to save lives by restricting misinformation? either way you are upholding an aquarian ideal, but in so doing you are disregarding a different aquarian ideal. there might be ways to thread the needle with compromise, but ultimately you not only can't please everybody, you can't really do "the right thing," because there is no single right thing, it's just a question of setting priorities according to your own executive, solar authority.

the challenges of the pandemic forced these platforms to make tough decisions which in some ways entrenched their institutional power but may ultimately lead to a reduction in their autonomy, whether that comes through regulation, reduced popularity, financial challenges, etc. (we'll see, it will probably be a combination of all these things.) if nothing else i think these years revealed that it's tough to position yourself as a principled tyrant in a hyper-democratic space like the internet. you may be able to hold onto power but you won't be very popular.

pluto enters aquarius next year just after saturn leaves for pisces. surely pluto's 20 years in aquarius will bring radical new developments in this paradoxical space, the tension between centralized authority and decentralized, democratized social organizing. lest we forget, this is the transit that brought us the US constitution (i don't mean to deify that document, but it is nonetheless a huge and noteworthy development in our history).

the chaos at twitter is fueling an interest in decentralized social media platforms such as mastodon. and i'm finally coming around to seeing that twitter was always a strangely solar platform. as much as each user's timeline was individually crafted by elusive machines, and there have always been various subcultures and communities gathering on that platform, at the end of the day, the whole appeal of twitter was that we were all in one space talking about the main event of our respective sphere. there's even a whole joke about how the goal of twitter is to avoid becoming the main character of the day. hell, the chart of the very first tweet has the sun exalted in aries in the 10th house.

whether or not twitter dies, or we all get comfortable on some other platform, perhaps it's that solar impulse that we need to think more critically about. do we all need to be watching the same channel? why do our eyes drift so compulsively back toward a single point of visual interest? there may be a loss if we congregate in the "silos" of decentralized servers, but surely we've already lost something of ourselves by surrendering to the gravitational pull of The Timeline these past however-many years.

just an initial foray into this somewhat obvious line of thinking.