What can we find online?

when is closeness not that close?

Can you step outside the algorithm and back into the world?

Last week I wrote about how a certain kind of “eroticontent” on Instagram is primed to sell you an idea of life, primed to advertise, which feels worse than porn. I’m going to write today about the ways that Venus represents connection, about Libra and about Taurus, and about how Venus in a time that Pluto is in Aquarius has some challenges, symbolically. I’ll also maybe spend some time talking about Jupiter in Gemini and Uranus in Gemini. 

Venus, as I’ve said before, a lot, is about connection, about beauty, about sensuality, about pleasure, about sweetness, and about how these things all come together and interact. There’s a great, long podcast episode on The Astrology Podcast about Venus (as well as all the other planets) that’s worth a listen if you’re really interested in these kinds of things. What I spent some time on last week was the consideration of what it means when a certain kind of consumerist rot gets into these Venus things. What is supposed to be a sensual and pleasurable experience becomes a site of lack. What’s supposed to be an exercise in beauty becomes an exercise in self-criticism. What’s supposed to fill you up ends up leaving you hollow. 

Consider Venus’s movement through the various signs in the sky is also illuminating. She’s at home in Taurus and Libra, exalted in Pisces, and uncomfy in Scorpio, Aries, and Virgo. This paints a picture of what makes Venus work best. Growth, softness, the aesthetic, harmony, and communal experience are her happiest significations while the signs that orient toward the individual, the sharp, the isolated, and the critical challenge her. Note: this isn’t to say that these signs are bad, but they aren’t conducive to what Venus wants to accomplish. They require alternative methods. 

“Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Aphorism 20. 

I’m just now picking my way through Minima Moralia and finding it, of course, dense, but I have been struck by the thread of ideas Adorno gets at that suggest mass communications and the culture industry are atomizing society and generally causing harm. Mind you, this was written in 1944 largely in response to the recent rise of fascism and genocide and new technologies that made cultural moments more ubiquitous. This is both very unlike and very similar to our world today. 

Social media is both somehow dead and central to everything—everyone I know is past the point of addiction, actively hating their social media but unclear on what their other options are to remain aware of what is happening in the world at large. The whole range of social technology is a swamp of doubles. Yes it’s true that these platforms can connect you with people you would not otherwise meet, but they also are guaranteed to detach you from the real world around you. Yes they can help isolated people connect with other places and people who present alternative futures, often alternative queer futures, but they also give you access to the very images that will deplete your sense of self and capacity to engage with the world to zero. We’re closer than ever and more estranged than ever.

When Theodor Adorno wrote Minima Moralia, Pluto was in Leo (opposite of where he’ll be for the foreseeable future, in Aquarius) and Uranus was in Gemini (right where Uranus will be from roughly 2025-2031).

At a high level, this is interesting because we might see Pluto in Leo as a sign of the fallen king, an indication that powerful figures at the center of government will not save us. This was certainly true for the very many victims of fascism who were not saved by their own leaders and who were only selectively saved by the “great men” of foreign powers once it benefitted their economic interests. As for Uranus, I tend to see his time in Gemini as a marker of new, disruptive technology that especially has impacts for social relations. Gemini evokes these community dynamics as well as technology while Uranus evokes new beginnings and rapid change. 

In addition to how these planets in these signs reflect broad cultural trends, we can consider how they impact the time that the inner planets spend in the signs. As long as Pluto is in Leo, he’s putting pressure on the inner planets every time they move through a fixed sign. While Uranus is in Gemini, he’s daring the other planets to take action, to be chaotic, every time they enter the already chaotic mutable signs. We’re about to enter this arrangement once again, with the significant difference that Pluto will be in Aquarius, further emphasizing technology and social relations.

While these two juggernauts of the outer planets situate themselves within these new signs, they’ll be consistently putting pressure on Venus, influencing the general flavor of connection over the coming years. When she’s in her home of Libra she’ll be egged on via trine by both planets, challenged with a square from Pluto when she’s in Taurus, and a square from Uranus when she’s in Pisces. These aren’t “bad” planets that will be a bad influence on Venus, but they will heighten the stakes of her time in these places. What happens when the representative of human connection is under even more intense scrutiny by the algorithm? What choices do we have in front of us and what choices will we make?

I am optimistic by nature. Call it a feature of being a white guy who grew up in Texas with pretty great parents or call it a feature of having a Fifth House Ascendant Ruler and an Eleventh House Sun. I tend toward optimism and, dare I say it, hope, even though much of modern history indicates that we tend to mess things up more often than we fix them. We might also call this willful ignorance/a coping strategy. 

One area of life in which I am less optimistic is the purpose and use of social media, which is why I appreciated this piece by Benjamin Y. Fong. He makes the case for why social media isn’t just ineffective, but actually dangerous for accomplishing progressive change and organizing the Left. It starts in response to an offered solution by another writer, Evan Malmgren, that we might see a future in which social media is nationalized and made useful for the project of democracy. I see that optimism I mentioned a second ago at work in Malmgren’s proposal. Unfortunately, the proposal doesn’t deserve the optimism he gives it. Social media mimics closeness, it mimics connection, and it mimics discourse, all things that we need in life. Behind that mimicry, though, is estrangement. 

Looking at the astrology of the coming decade, there’s a good case to be made for expecting these kinds of initiatives. With Pluto in Aquarius we’re primed for an emphasis on the collective. With Neptune moving into Aries, there’s the potential for the erosion of the myth of the individual. Uranus in Gemini might upend our online social relations while his time in Cancer could revolutionize the idea of care. All of this unfolding while we as individuals continue to work on the immediate, the interpersonal, the Venusian. But, like all things astrology, looking for what you want to see in the charts of the future is guaranteed to be a mistake. What’s that saying? Expectations are just premeditated disappointments. Is that all they are?

I couldn’t let this newsletter end without spending some time on the Gay Internet and wondering about what we can do to save it from advertising, from venture funding, and from each other. 

Obviously, the social media that I discussed last week, the eroticontent that can be both low- and high-brow, is a contributor to the estrangement that Adorno was already describing in the 1940s and that has continued into today’s mass and social media. It fits the bill nicely. Sure, I could be a young person in Ingram, TX (population 1,836) and learn about gay subcultures, safe sex, kink, and romance between men via Instagram or TikTok or Reddit or anything else. These barely existed when I was myself a young person in Ingram, TX, but what little bit did (Tumblr and YouTube, mostly) was essential. These are good. At the same time, that young person on TikTok or the young person I was on Tumblr is also inevitably going through a process of atomization. The safe “social” media that I can find in my phone is a lot more appealing than the relatively less safe but truly social experience of ferreting out other gay or gay-friendly people in my real world. 

So, what’s a gay to do? What’s a gay astrologer meant to do with these limitations of the technology and these unknowns in the sky? 

Looking, again, at Cruising Utopia, I see some hope (that optimism again) in what Muñoz says about utopia’s utility for queer life. Quoting Ernst Bloch, he says: “the essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present”. He goes on to unpack this in the context of queer people’s storytelling, in our tendency to amp up our memories, specifically within the context of a pre-AIDs world. He argues that it’s by identifying what we hope for, identifying what we wish were true, that we can identify what is specifically not-utopic in the present. 

We may not be able to predict what will happen or predict the specific contours of that future state, but we can intimately familiarize ourselves with whatever is wrong with right now. Importantly, this cannot happen entirely “online”, cannot be a project of curating only images and curating only connections via platform-dependent “follows” or “friends” or “likes”. These encounters don’t exist in the right now, they exist somewhere else, I think. Whatever work is done in these non-spaces has to rapidly be moved elsewhere, whether it be a gay bar, a library, the brushy, hidden areas of a public park, or inside your own home. 

This will be one of the challenges and an opportunity of Pluto’s time in Aquarius and Uranus’s time in Gemini and Cancer. While their influence will push the inner planets toward ideas, technology, and social relations, the inner planets will need to find ways to operate elsewhere, especially Venus. When given the choice, can you choose real connections, real pleasures, and real beauty? When given the choice, can you forgo what’s artificially close for what’s tangible, even when it’s difficult? 

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.