Dreaming the Life
Reawakening to the Tactile Universe
The quality of the digital environments that we inhabit is rapidly declining. We can all feel it. The bait and switch is nearing completion. The internet lured us in with promises of interconnection, cross-pollination and collaboration; a wild frontier of unfathomable possibility. Unfortunately, what has mostly transpired is a hapless mass-march into an irredeemable panopticon of bullshit. Every moment spent online is surveilled, every purchase logged, every click and search—even the movement of our eyeballs is tracked and filed away for analysis by bots who have no qualms at all about psychologically profiling us with the straightforward aim of maximum financial extraction. We are continually lured into signing contracts, subscriptions and service agreements which confine us in the roles of passive consumer or indentured content creator, only for every good thing about the services offered to subsequently be punctuated and, ultimately, replaced by advertising, bots and other algorithmically provided guff.
This has all been widely written about, and while I will expand on these topics throughout the article, I won’t do a better job than tech-ethics specialists such as Cory Doctorow, Shoshana Zuboff, Tristan Harris and many others. If you don’t really understand what I’m talking about in the previous paragraph, I recommend you read their books and articles or listen to their podcast appearances. That said, you don’t need to do that in order to understand what follows here.
In this article, I want to explore the way we participate in these inherently untrustworthy and exploitative digital spaces from an astrological perspective. In a world where the internet threatens to turn all our brains to worthless goo, what guidance can we take from the planetary archetypes, what lessons are we being called to learn, and what kinds of developments might we be able to expect?
This inquiry will involve the archetypes associated with all four of the outermost planets: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Currently, we are undergoing a 10-year trine between Uranus and Pluto, as well as a conjunction between Saturn and Neptune which will hover around the midpoint between Uranus and Pluto for the next 3 years.
I will start by exploring the relevant dimensions of the Uranus-Pluto cycle, before bringing in the influence of Neptune and Saturn in turn.
Uranus and Pluto—Technological Evolution
The Uranus-Pluto pairing is a potent combination which is expressed in many different ways: revolutionary action and movements for liberation; sexual emancipation and heightened Dionysian activity; breakthroughs and radical new approaches in the arts. Though it would be useful for context, a complete elaboration of this pairing is beyond the scope of this article, and so I will focus here on the dimension that we are primarily concerned with: technological evolution.*1
The Pluto archetype is the very principle of evolution. It is the reason sub-atomic particles come together to make particles, which form simple chemical elements which coalesce to form stars, which in turn produce more complex chemical elements which coalesce into planets. It is the answer to the question of why, on at least one of those planets, chemical elements spontaneously formed cells, then simple cellular life, then complex organisms like you and I. It is also why the cells and micro-organisms that you and I are, must replace themselves over time, and why all sexual organisms are instinctually driven to reproduce. The Pluto archetype is the blindly striving will of the universe which endlessly seeks to overcome itself, and it never runs out of power.
The Uranus (or, more accurately, Prometheus) archetype is the principle of liberation and ingenuity; the spark of brilliance that empowers and emancipates humanity; the better world of tomorrow that pulls us towards itself with some unseen teleology. It flows in the veins of every rebel, protester and activist, compelling them to pursue the possibility of a paradigm more just and free than this one. It is the reason scientists will never ever stop trying to explore the universe at every level, even as we collectively begin to wonder whether more ‘progress’ is really what we need. It is that tantalising possibility of escape, and the victorious final moment of rebirth—the arrival of a new sense of Self that co-emerges with a new paradigm—the divine ecstasy that comes from the successful completion of a cycle of individuation or personal transformation.
When they come together, these archetypes tend to preside over periods of disruption to the status quo, initiated by the simultaneous activation of rebellious Promethean spirit in many different domains. In particular, it is worth noting the synchronistic parallels between the development of the computer and the Uranus-Pluto cycle:
In 1822, during a trine between Uranus and Pluto, Charles Babbage invented the mechanical difference engine—the first ever general purpose or “Turing complete” computer.*2
During the square alignment of the 1930s, British engineer Tommy Flowers (born with UR opposite PL) created the first fully electronic computer, which was implemented by 1939 as a working telephone exchange.
In 1943, during a sextile, Flowers was commissioned to build Colossus—the digital computer that would be used at Bletchley Park to decrypt coded German communications during WWII.*3
Throughout the conjunction of the 1960s, a slew of developments allowed for the replacement of vacuum tubes with integrated circuits, which we now refer to as microchips.
It was also during the 1960s conjunction that early predecessors of the internet like ARPANET were first invented and put into use.
In 1990, during the following sextile, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser, and by the end of the sextile in 2001, 8% of the world’s population (36% of people in the ‘developed’ world) were using the internet.*4
Under the same sextile, the first device that could be referred to as a smartphone was also invented—the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, created by Frank Canova.
At the beginning of the Uranus-Pluto square which began in 2007, the first i-phone was launched, and the age of ubiquitous smartphone usage began in earnest.
It was also during the early part of this 14 year square alignment that facebook and twitter (though officially launched some months before the square began) soared to popularity. Instagram and TikTok also launched under this square, as well as the cornucopia of media streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix.
Finally, this same square also presided over the beginnings of the age of machine learning/AI, which were immediately integrated into all the social media and streaming platforms previously mentioned, in order to serve the users content in a more ‘engaging’ manner (for better or more likely, worse).
While it must be acknowledged that there were many significant contributing events that occurred in between these various alignments of Uranus and Pluto, it is nonetheless quite possible to discern a compelling pattern. The inventions of the first mechanical computer, first digital computer, the microchip, the internet, the smartphone and advent of digital social media and machine learning all took place under the influence of Uranus-Pluto alignments.
The trine between the two which we are currently experiencing will last for another 9 or so years. We may certainly hope that the trine is a more forgiving and confluent alignment than the conjunction of the 1960s or the square of 2007-2021, but this not guaranteed. I believe that almost every person on the planet is becoming inescapably and viscerally (though perhaps still too slowly) aware that the pace of technological advance is reaching a tumultuous crescendo, and that our adaptive capacity as human beings is straining ever more desperately to keep up with the evolutionary potency of the digital spaces which we have come to inhabit. *5
With the integration of machine learning algorithms into social media and streaming services, something rather strange has come to pass. Technological entities that nobody really understands (Uranus) have been granted access to our unconscious minds (Pluto). We permit them to build psychological profiles of us based on their ability to track behaviours (eye movement, mouse hover, clicks, purchases, etc), many of which are performed by us without conscious intent. At the same time, our behaviours (intentional or not) are shaping the behaviour of the algorithm. In this sense, “the singularity” has already occurred, for it is no longer possible to distinguish the dividing line between human mind and machine. It is not that the machines have outpaced us and developed their own consciousness. The machines participate in consciousness through us, and have become a powerful driver of psychological evolution. We are cyborgs, and have been for some time.
There are many problems here that stem from one shadow side of Uranus-Pluto, namely the reckless pursuit of progress without adequate integration of wisdom. The people developing all the aforementioned technologies may have been personally motivated by an admirable Promethean desire for progress. But, a cursory glance under the surface of the industrial landscape which they have been working in reveals a much less laudable incentive structure—power and profit are the goals of these industries, not freedom and the betterment of humanity.
The Quiet Persistence of Power
In my estimation, the problem with our relationship to the Uranus-Pluto pair is one of inadequate or improper orientation—the power that we are able to unleash through technological evolution suffers, as we all do individually, from our cultural lack of relationship to the infinite, the sacred, the transcendent ideal, the higher archetypes of truth, goodness and beauty, or whatever name you care to assign. For my purposes as an astrologer, it is adequate to say that our Uranus-Pluto is not placed properly in service to Neptune. One could also say that our Prometheus-Dionysus complex is running rough-shod over our connection with the Divine Mother. We are, as a culture, possessed by the archetypes of power and progress, so we hastily reject and trample the ever-present ineffable wonder of existence in favour of a thoughtless and rampant pursuit of the freedom to dominate the world around us.
But Neptune—the archetype of spirituality, mystery and illusion—is not so easily shunned. When we fail to assign the transcendent its proper place as the target and guiding light of progress (whether personal or collective), its more problematic facets and dimensions inevitably rise to the surface. In its highest form, the Neptune archetype inspires a sense of wonder and invites us to explore our connection with the imaginal realm, but when it is not honoured, Neptune can be a confusing or pacifying force which prevents us from seeing clearly and makes it difficult to feel truly grounded in reality. Neptune always softens the most heinous abuses of Plutonic power, but it never fully cleanses us of our capacity for gross misconduct—a veneer of peace is better than no peace, but try telling that to the victims whose suffering arises from the callous externalisation of harms by those in power who are so busy congratulating one another for the ‘peace’.
For example, during the conjunction of Neptune and Pluto in the late 19th/early 20th century occurred a period referred to in Europe as '“the Belle Epoque”—a time of great peace and prosperity. Yet this was also a time of unprecedented colonial expansion during which a vast number of atrocities were committed. The period of time in between that conjunction and the following sextile (when Neptune and Pluto were not in any kind of alignment) contained both world wars—times when the horrors of the human shadow were displayed and expressed with an overt brutality which no person could smooth over or whitewash. The following sextile began in 1943 and, once again, marked a transition into a more seemingly peaceful time.
In reality, the shadows in the human psyche remained: the pursuit of power and the colonial impulse merely took on quieter and more secretive forms; the materialist-atheist worldview continued to solidify itself in the minds of the collective; cultures the world over continued to erase their connection with the sacred in favour of mindless consumerism; brutal industrialism and unsustainable extractive processes blossomed in every corner of the Earth. The extremely short-sighted policy of using nuclear weapons (Pluto) as a means to keep peace (Neptune) ushered in a time of spy-craft and subterfuge—war took place behind a veil of secrecy. Perhaps it is possible to see here how when Neptune is not given its proper place as the ineffable higher power which all our efforts are ultimately in service to, it comes to function as a pervasive smokescreen behind which our worst impulses can operate in quiet obscurity.
Because of the unusual nature of the Neptune-Pluto cycle, the sextile that began in 1943 remain in effect until 2038. For the purposes of this article, what this means is that every aspect between Uranus and Pluto from 1943 onwards also significantly involved Neptune in some way. In fact, Neptune was also aspecting both Uranus and Pluto during almost every event listed in the history of computer development.*6
Away With the Fairies
As has already been emphasised, Neptune relates to everything that is non-physical, imaginary, illusory and ineffable. In its highest manifestations, it is the force that pulls us towards transcendent spiritual experiences and affords us a sense of divine inspiration. But perhaps more commonly, Neptune draws us into fantasy worlds that seem real to us and are often preferable to the ongoing slog of the everyday world.
British folk tales are filled with such motifs: a protagonist is lured away by the Fae to a magical realm where everyone is always happy, entertained, preoccupied with pleasure, and utterly unconcerned by the struggles of the real world. “How wonderful!” says our protagonist, seeing a world without responsibility and strife. But soon, they realise that there is nothing in this world to nourish and restore them, and the endless participation in ungrounded fantasy begins to deplete their vital energy. Then, when they try to leave, they find that the Fae are not so easily brushed aside, that they have in fact made a bargain without realising it, and find themselves a prisoner in this other realm. They still attend the parties and have access to all the pleasures and fantastical delights, but the life-force is slowly draining away from them, and they need to get back to reality where, by forthrightly engaging with the suffering they were initially happy to escape, they can become whole again.
Like the protagonists in these tales, we must contend with the fact that, as far as the algorithms are concerned, the digital world is the only environment. Exactly like the Fae in the stories, the algorithms seek only to keep us engaged in the fantasy world. They do not and cannot know about the tactile world of vivid sensory experience which we inhabit, and therefore they do not and cannot value it. Almost all the machine learning algorithms that provide us with content exist to perform one central task: sustain and increase engagement—we may try to leave the party, but always seem to find ourselves somehow back in the ballroom in a surreal daze. Does this not describe the feeling you have, scrolling through your Netflix homepage or facebook feed? Entertained yet empty, awash in content yet starved of meaning; constantly pandered to and pampered, yet constrained, exploited, disrespected and used; ever burdened with a vague yet grave concern that you are wasting your life and neglecting something important?
The endless algorithmic quest for greater engagement seems all the more worrying when one considers the fact that a great deal of what we find most engaging is precisely that which appeals to our unconscious instinctual drives and unintegrated shadow material. Of course, we do need to engage with these parts of ourselves, but the digital spaces are utterly incapable of providing us with the actual opportunities to work with and process them, because to do so would require our wholehearted and whole-bodied participation, and full psychological engagement, which is impossible (at least for the foreseeable future) in the digital world.
Instead, we occupy a kind of stasis, either projecting these Plutonic qualities onto newfound enemies and opponents in comment threads (which ultimately go nowhere and change nothing), or passively consuming dramatic representations of the darker dimensions of the human psyche. Consider how the huge boom in online content provision has coincided with the endless stream of true-crime podcasts and shows, conspiracy and cult documentaries, and gritty dramas featuring problematic anti-heroes—so much content that predominantly serve to enable and encourage our deep cultural fascination with psychopaths and narcissists. Our online engagement with the Plutonic shadow is essentially pornographic, both literally and figuratively; we are granted unlimited access to displays of the Pluto archetype that are at once glorified and trivialised, encouraging us to develop delusions of cultural maturity and shadow integration, while really we are just sitting down, passively consuming media, mistaking prideful displays of unintegrated shadow for authenticity.
Perhaps philosopher Donna J Haraway, born under the sextile of the 1940s, is a voice that we should pay particular attention to in these times. Anticipating our current situation with uncanny prescience, Haraway, in her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto, wrote:
“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”*7
― Donna J. Haraway (Uranus sextile Pluto, Neptune sextile Pluto)
The Real World Consequences of Fake World Problems
The astrologically conscious among you will have detected the influence of Saturn in many of the previous paragraphs, but here I will speak to it directly. Saturn is the archetype of negation—it orients us towards the problematic dimensions of whatever it is interacting with. It is also the archetype of material reality; the solid stuff of which the world is made. It is the passing of linear time, and the necessary grappling with mortality which all physical beings must engage in, one way or another. Saturn delivers consequences, especially when it arrives into an ongoing dynamic which is already over-extended or which has arisen from incautious behaviour.
Obviously, we cannot expect there to be no negative consequences arising from our headlong rush to orient our consciousness ever more towards digital environments which evolve faster than we do, and which disregard the material universe so completely. I will mention some of them here, before turning to what might be done to improve the situation.
Attention and Focus
I would contend that we are already witnessing widespread detrimental effects of overexposure to toxic digital environments. If you are over the age of 30, reflect on how you feel about your attention span and ability to focus in comparison with how you felt about them even as little as 5 years ago. I believe that we are swiftly moving towards a situation where the majority of people tested for ADHD or ADD would meet the criteria for one diagnosis or the other.
I don’t mean to explain away the experience of people who benefit from being diagnosed with conditions like these, but I will push back against the idea that these so called disorders are best approached as defects to be solved at the level of the individual. We can and should see many of the symptoms of ADD and ADHD as quite predictable expressions of a pathological cultural environment. I won’t argue that digital overexposure is the only (or even the central) causal mechanism of those ‘disorders’—to do so would be opportunistic on my part. But I will predict that unless the platforms we use increase substantially in quality and ethical standard, more exposure to them will result in more problems with focus and attention, and more diagnoses.
Social Anxiety and the Death of Conversation
In addition, it is now clear that social media, in addition to being no substitute for embodied social interaction, can also have the effect of increasing social anxiety, and generally screwing with the development of psychological and emotional mechanisms that allow build healthy relationships to one another. It is frankly embarrassing how often friends and family are together in the same room, each thoroughly involved in whatever brand of bullshit is being provided by their individual devices, unable to string together even the vaguest semblance of a conversation. I don’t mean to shame anyone—we’re all comrades and fellow prisoners the panopticon of bullshit—but honestly I think the vast majority of us feel ashamed of ourselves already, of what we are turning into: diminished, degraded, disinterested echoes of our former selves, content to be amused by meaningless nonsense, like cats chasing a laser pointer, haunted by epigenetically imprinted memories of their fierce and vital ancestors.
Lack of Intimacy and Embodied Connection
Since the pandemic, it has been stated by many that we are in the midst of an intimacy crisis—more people than ever are starved for affectionate human touch, and seem to lack the skills, confidence, motivation or appropriate social contexts in which to connect with other warm-bodied human beings, whether that be in a romantic or platonic sense. People below the age of 30 have grown up in a world where a large percentage of social interaction takes place through social media platforms. But these platforms turn the social world into a world of quantifiable success and failure; they encourage us to measure our social position using their shallow metrics; to evaluate our relationships the terms of the fake world. If the platforms incentivised their users to meet in real life (or even talk on the phone) and establish realtime, embodied connections with each other, this might even out the pros and cons somewhat, but they don’t. They only incentivise more and more compulsive interaction with the app.
Lack of Authenticity/Over-Emphasis on Persona
It is also probably the case that we are undergoing what might reasonably be called an authenticity crisis. It has always been the case that, even in our interactions in the physical world, we present a version of ourselves to others based on strategic motivations, hoping to emphasise our more likeable and useful traits—embodiment is no guarantee of authenticity. But it must simultaneously be acknowledged that many of the checks and balances that embodiment enforces—our implicit ability to read one another’s body language, eye movements, tone of voice, and so on—are wholly dispensed with when interacting digitally. This throws open the door to all kinds of deception, from the seemingly inconsequential through to the outright malevolent.
Even putting the more extreme cases to one side, there is a pernicious dimension to this, which is that social media makes it possible for us to curate and control our various personas with meticulous attention to detail. The words and images we choose to share in these environments often present personas which are inadequately inclusive of many different facets of the entire personality. They may function well enough to serve our limited conscious purposes, but are less likely to help us individuate or move towards wholeness. These curated identities run on the logic of likes, shares, and subscriber counts, and if we become too closely identified them, then we ourselves become confined by their overly narrow boundaries.
Very often, growth and positive change in life requires us to be less driven by the need to control how we are perceived. But social media platforms are like cognitive railroad tracks which lead completely in the opposite direction. We find ourselves forced to defend and maintain the boundaries of our online facades, to the detriment of our own complexity and freedom of expression. Or, if we remain distanced from our online personas (which may seem preferable), we then create and compound a need for dissociation between the online persona and the broader sense of self. This might not be unliveable, but any splitting of the personality in the current moment only creates a need for inner reconciliation later down the line, which is generally not a straightforward matter.
Returning to Sacred Ground
It is not exactly revolutionary to state that the internet is bad for mental health. The astrological lens helps us to broaden this conversation, and illuminates the ways in which our codependency with the digital world also affects us emotionally, relationally, somatically, and spiritually.
I know I have painted a grim picture here, but I think it is important that we begin to wake up out of our oblivious sleep-walk into an increasingly disembodied and spiritually disconnected mode of life, and confront the fact that the digital world is vastly inferior to the real world, and always will be. Certainly, it feels easier to control what happens in the digital world, and in a time of such vast uncertainty, it is understandable why we are drawn towards it. But here’s another fact: the corporations that control the platforms which you are addicted to have a vested interest in your unhappiness—you can’t sell things to people based on how contented and fulfilled they are, you have to make them feel small and inadequate, before offering them a ‘solution’. As we move through the next few years, it will become increasingly clear that the tech industry has settled into a steady pattern of treating the internet as a bait ball of helpless consumers to be bombarded with endless psychological bullying, we all need to ask some serious questions about how much we want to participate in those environments.
While Saturn is at the midpoint of Uranus and Pluto, we have an opportunity to evaluate the worthiness of our pursuit of technological and scientific progress. This will be an ongoing conversation at the collective level. At the same time, we are also each being invited to slow down and carry out our own risk assessment. Whenever there is a headlong Promethean rush into the future, Saturn asks us what goals are actually worth pursuing, and what must be preserved as we move forwards? Collectively, we need to advocate for the creation of digital platforms which recognise the innate dignity of their human users, and so do not treat them as an exploitable resource. And individually, we need to build up enough inner steel and resilience that we are actually able to resist the descent into history’s most tedious and widespread collective addiction, and make conscious choices about where our attention goes.
A very important piece of this puzzle has to do with our aforementioned relationship to the Neptune archetype. Addiction is a multifaceted phenomenon, which involves a different combination of archetypal influences for every individual, but it is possible to discern the role of Neptune in every instance. Neptune represents the soul’s deepest craving: to remember the truth of its interconnection with the totality of being. There are a million ways to frame this quest. One need not, for example, practice astrology in order to do this work—one way or another, it is a major driving factor of all spiritual and religious practice and, given time, all rivers lead back to the ocean.
A spiritual path can take myriad forms, but in order for it to function, it must provide at least some ways to expand the individual’s experience of consciousness to the point that it can hold just a little more of the overall picture of things. It is in these certain moments, whether intentionally induced or spontaneously occurring, that the grace and benevolence of the universe can gift us with the solace of knowing that we are not alone, nor could we be, nor have we ever been, and nor shall we ever be. This is what is on offer to those who engage with their own bodies, who honour their emotions rather than constantly dissociating; who make their homes in the sacred, tactile, tangibility of the real world and work to dignify the material plane through devotion.
For too long now, the screen has become our portal to the non-material world. So quite naturally, we turn to it for relief. But what has been created in this new realm, once buoyed with such optimism, is not a healing balm for the wounded soul, but a life-sapping bemusement park for the overstimulated. If you feel scattered, confused, overwhelmed by information, apathetic, distracted, addled, and utterly at a loss to know how to make a positive difference to your own life, at least know this: you are not alone. But do try not to confuse the digital world with the real one. The more time you spend in the digital world, the worse the real world seems. Partly, this is because the internet feeds you information about bad things that are really happening, but partly (and perhaps a larger part) it is because the internet is increasingly designed to make you feel incomplete and unsatisfied. You may find that decreasing your digital exposure by one quarter yields extremely positive results.
Rather than a digital portal to a nebulous netherworld of delusion, what if we remembered that the physical world itself is (you could say, by design) a portal to the divine?
What if all you needed to do, to completely revolutionise your experience of the world, was stop pointlessly consuming information and entertainment, and spend that time in reverie, or in prayer, or walking around aimlessly, or working in a garden, or talking to your loved ones, or lying in the bath, or playing a sport, or making art, or cooking and sharing a meal with friends, or swimming in the ocean, or dancing, or dreaming?
Would you do it?
Post Script
I am aware that this piece reads as a rather straightforward rejection of the digital world and, frankly, I stand by it. It is time for us to awaken to the fact that almost everything in the digital world is a hollow facsimile of something whose real world counterpart is infinitely preferable. Simultaneously, I recognise that, barring a massive solar weather event, the digital world is simply not going anywhere. I have focused on articulating the reasons why now is a good time to consider rejecting the digital world, because at least the average person, given the right tools and motivation, can make that choice. Or, at least they can work to improve their ability to make that choice in the future. As I stated already, we also need to vastly improve the standard and ethical quality of the digital environments that most people have no choice but to use on a daily basis. So, if any tech CEOs happen to be reading this, take heed: The conscious attention of human beings, to the extent that it can be viewed as a resource, is a sacred resource. Please stop building more wings onto the panopticon of bullshit—you are degrading and diminishing the dignity, potency and quality of the human being itself—ourselves.
The broader topic of Uranus-Pluto alignments is dealt with comprehensively by Richard Tarnas in his book Cosmos and Psyche.
At the time of writing (May 2024), we are also coming to the end of a conjunction between Jupiter and Uranus, which has certainly emphasised this feeling in the collective psyche.
With the single exception of Tommy Flowers’ invention of the first fully electronic computer in the 1930s.
A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna J Haraway