It's taken me 14 years to get a handle on the 21st century, but I finally feel like I'm making some progress. One thing that I will say is that I'm learning how helpful it is to look to the past for some information about where we are today. It may not be the ultimate guide, but if you want to know where "here" is, it's a good idea to know where you came from and how you went.
That includes the astrological past, and it includes the past as told by eras when one communication medium collided with another one. Fortunately there is an easy intersection of those themes, as told in astrology, media studies and social history.
In 1964, in a time much like our own, when many things were changing very fast and few people understood what was happening, a soft-spoken English professor, a Canadian fellow named Marshall McLuhan, came out with a book that explains how society has become a product of its media. It always does, he says, and if you want to understand what society is becoming and why it's becoming that way, look at how people communicate. Look at their technology. That will tell you the story of what is actually happening.
He takes this back to the emergence of the printed word—the innovation of the typeset and printed book, which paralleled the development of industrial society and industrialized people. He describes how the printed word led to a sense of false individualization, which in turn de-tribalized society. The printed word ended the oral tradition of in-person storytelling.
The mode or "medium" of communication, McLuhan proposed, is more influential than the specific content. That is what he means by "the medium is the message." For anyone doubting this, he suggests you consider the electric light—a medium of pure information without specific content. Electric light changed civilization, and everyone and everything with it. It turned night to day and in the process, changed every person, every town and every city with it. What was the message of light? Well, it was LIGHT!
While this is happening, it's difficult to notice, because it's happening gradually, and as a new technology, it's taken for granted. People figured out that TV was changing politics when John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon for the presidency because he understood how to use TV and Nixon did not. All politics followed suit, but we stopped noticing.
Today we are in the age of the Internet fully emerging. It's true that I'm writing this article on the 16th anniversary of the Planet Waves website. The Internet itself is not brand new, but its mass proliferation is—mainly in the form of the "smart phone."
The "smart phone" puts the Internet everywhere, all the time. It therefore puts the user everywhere, all the time—often except where they actually are, such as having dinner with friends, while texting someone else, somewhere else.
The Internet is redefining the concept of self in such a way that there is no private self, there's just a public self. Anything conveyed via the Internet is presumed to be public, whether voluntarily, by surveillance, or by hacking. One's private self becomes a mass media event.
Tom Wolfe, an author who was one of the first people to understand and promote the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, parodied the "media event" in his book The Bonfire of the Vanities. In one scene there was supposed to be a protest, but which was not quite happening. Then the TV truck arrived, raised its mast with the microwave dish on top, and everyone gathered around the truck and the protest actually happened.
This is becoming the story of our lives.
In the story of astrology, the current developments are described by the transit of Uranus in Aries. Aries is the sign of self-concept, self-seeking, identity, and "I am" in general. Uranus has been in this sign for a little while, making some bold aspects there. Uranus is about technology, inventions, revolutions and very fast, unexpected changes, often on a mass scale. By inventions I mean some of the most important ones, such as the light bulb and the airplane (and the Moon landing, the Concorde and the 747, all of which happened under the influence of Uranus).
In Aries, Uranus represents the rapid technological developments we're now experiencing, and it also represents reinvention of self as a result of those advances. It's kind of the ultimate description of the selfie—the obsession with self, but that self is being broadcast almost all the time—to some group. The thing is, what we're experiencing or exploring now is the selfie defining the self, rather than being a picture of the pre-existing self.
You might think of Uranus in Aries as the total reinvention of the self concept, dominated by technology. Self is now group property, it's nonlocal (you appear many places simultaneously). The concept of the immediate, physically present, one-to-one relationship is evaporating. And with that, a sense of self, the private self that can exist within itself, is evaporating as well.
One property of Uranus is its connection to groups, and the concept of self is verging on meaningless without affirmation or acknowledgement by the larger self of the group. It's becoming more prevalent that a person is a media event, and without that media presence, one does not exist.
Once the province of Weegee Felig (the world's first spot-news photographer, who spawned many great artists with his vision), now every person has a camera and darkroom with them at all times. Everyone also has a police scanner, a tape recorder, telegraph machine, fax machine, TV camera, editing studio and broadcast facilities in their pocket everywhere, all the time.
Not surprisingly, everyone is expected to respond in realtime to everyone else, all the time. You must reply to everything, instantly. It doesn't matter if you're eating, sleeping, driving, in a therapy session, taking a poo or a bath, or wholly drunk. You must be absolutely responsive at all moments while connected to a nervous system that spans the entire globe. Admittedly, this might make it difficult to get a moment to yourself or to share a private thought, but since "yourself" and "private" and "thought" barely exist anymore, that's not too much of a problem.
Uranus in Aries officially began the day of the Fukushima incident in March 2011, when technology went horribly wrong, when a whole lot of uranium began leaking into the environment. At that time, a toxin emerged in awareness (and the ocean) as something that could contaminate anyone, anywhere. That was a warning of what can happen when things go out of control.
Uranus in Aries is related to another current transit, Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto can have the property of Shiva the Destroyer. Capricorn is the sign of the corporate state—governments, companies and anything that upholds the structure and integrity of society. That transit began the year of the mortgage and banking scandal, in 2008.
While the self is undergoing its technological transformation, the corporate structure of society is being routed, changed, dismantled by Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto in Capricorn is change from beneath. The concept "tectonic" comes to mind—associated with the movement of the continental plates.
There is another quality of Pluto moving through Capricorn which you could describe as a do or die need to put a little soul into these corporate structures of society. They can no longer be so inhuman and insensitive to human needs. It's as if the concept of a private person is being eliminated by Uranus in Aries, while at the same time corporations are being made to find their soul.
This sounds a little like a big theme of our era—corporate personhood. Some day we will need a Supreme Court decision to affirm that people are people—that is, if we can get the justices to agree with that novel theory of law. The clash of the cultures between the individual and the corporate (and the reversal of roles) is a huge theme of our times, and it's happening on many different levels.
Uranus and Pluto are working together—that is the Uranus-Pluto square. It's an aspect (a meeting or alignment) between these two powerful slow-movers that spans over seven events from June 2012 to March 2015. Then the aspect begins to separate. But that does not mean that its power is reduced. We are likely to see the most interesting manifestations of Uranus square Pluto this year and into the next three to five years.
The aspect's exact span (those seven events from 2012 through 2015) were just the thing that got the momentum going. Now we get to ride the toboggan down the slippery slope.
Two other aspects play into this same story. While so much is happening in the world of structure, and with the concept of self being turned inside out, there's another area of the sky that describes a profound inner pull.
Reading what I've written so far, you might get the idea that everything of any significance is being externalized, but in Pisces, there are developments that describe the inner environment and its most intimate expressions. Slow-moving (and therefore especially influential) planets are gathering there as well.
The two best known are Neptune and Chiron, which ingressed Pisces between 2010 and 2012. Pisces is the inner cosmic realm—the closest thing you can call spiritual in the sense of direct experience. Neptune is the modern planet associated with Pisces, which amplifies the effect. There's a lot more Pisces than usual to go around—it's as if a fresh ocean of water has been added to that inner realm that Pisces represents.
Chiron has a focusing effect. Pisces is not always easy to grasp; Chiron is much more obvious. A good example of Chiron in Pisces is the effect that the Beatles had on the 1960s, the last time Chiron was in Pisces. The Beatles took that message of peace and love, focused it and made sure we all got to see it.
There's a planet similar to Chiron, called Nessus, which is going to enter Pisces early in the year. Nessus has a focusing effect similar to Chiron, but what it focuses is the theme of accountability. The message is that we are all responsible for attending to that inner realm that we possess. Both Chiron and Nessus come with a caution, which is that the space they are occupying is not optional. Tuning into one's inner space is a necessity.
Life cannot be lived exclusively outwardly. At a certain point, you must regard your inner life as real. There is a fourth slow-mover in Pisces, called Borasisi. That has the message that you are responsible for what you believe and the effects that it has on you.
Surrounded as we are by many distracting, perhaps useful technologies, the invitation of the planets in Pisces is to use that technology for creative purposes; for humanitarian purposes; for awareness.
Marshall McLuhan was fond of two concepts, both of which are described by these Pisces planets. One concept was the way in which the environment we live in tends to be invisible. Pisces tends to be invisible. Yet Chiron in particular focuses awareness of the environment and our relationship to it.
The other concept was pattern recognition. Overwhelmed as we often are, sometimes the only thing left to do is to notice the patterns of your life and of the world you live in, and see what you can observe. There's too much going on to take on one item at a time. Confronted by all experience being simultaneous, awareness of patterns is one of the few things that can keep you from drowning. This kind of consciousness is the morph of self-awareness and that of your environment.
Here in the early 21st century they have very nearly merged into the same thing—and that process is just getting started.