Star Dystopia
Heads up! fu:bar 2020 is happening virtually this year!
The longest EVER annual glitch art festival, fu:bar, is still on this year! I’ve gone to Zagreb, Croatia for the in-person event multiple times and it is an absolutely transformative experience. I’m sure it will be online, too. They recently extended their deadline for proposals to August 15th, so if you have something cool and glitchy you’d like to share, you should absolutely apply.
Onto the newsletter!
This issue of Glitchet turned into more of an essay than a newsletter. That means that you’ll get quite a few musics this time! (Ordered intentionally. Check the bottom of the Glitchet Spotify playlist to listen in sequence without clicking if that’s your jam.)
I spend a lot of time thinking about astrology. Like, a lot of time. During a remote happy hour, someone asked me if I thought the functionality of astrology depends on whether you believe it or not. I ranted that astrology is real (i.e. it “works”, which I’ll get into in a sec) and it doesn’t give a crap if you believe in it or not, much like COVID. Those two things aren’t related, I just feel strongly about both of them and I had had precisely one beer and was ready to call a social worker.
(One of the other things I think about is basil fried rice, which to me is the perfect judgment of any Thai restaurant. I judge restaurants by the popular-but-slightly-less-popular recipes that are easy to just “phone in” and difficult to get just quite right. For Thai food, that’s basil fried rice. Also, I just really fucking love basil.)
If your mental picture of astrology is a once-a-day horoscope that proclaims that your day will be such and such because you have one of exactly 12 personalities, you’d be right to be incredibly derisive of that system’s claims. So please allow me to paint you a bigger picture. (If you’re familiar with the fundamentals of astrology, feel free to skip this section.)
A brief astrological primer
Here’s a star chart for the current moment as I type. In modern western astrology, a star chart represents, at the point in time it was “cast” for, the position of 10 (or more) planetary bodies that live in certain positions in the tropical zodiac (note: NOT the literal constellations in the sky, the zodiacal names don’t refer to the actual stars), creating aspects or angles between them representing interactivity between the topics/behaviors the planets correlate to, within certain “houses” that rule various topics of the life.
For instance, if I were to read this chart “blind” as if it were a person without asking any clarifying questions, I might say something like: this is a person who is very involved in understanding their own identity in relation to another person, likely a romantic partner but possibly any significant commitment with another person, such as a business partner. They would likely experience sudden swings in their sense of self and identity and be very “fast paced”. Possibly a very quick thinker but a tendency to get lost in throes of subjectivity, prone to catastrophizing situations or being too barbed with their words. Highly competitive and sexually aggressive but they have a yearning to experience romance and play in a way that is eclectic, unpredictable, and mischevious. Likely to have a vast emotionality that is still restrained, aloof, protected and hidden from others. Possibly difficulty holding onto money or possessions; things disappear from the life suddenly and swiftly. This is probably the chart of a deeply thoughtful and powerful writer (memoirist/slice of life seems about right), if they can get past their confrontation with the Other in life.
It’d be like that sometimes, Lain Cortés González
I’ve been reading charts long enough that this is a party trick I do with complete strangers, and I generally have a roughly 70-90% accuracy rate. Of course, skeptics will decry that 10-30% as if it invalidates everything, despite the fact that this in the scenario I describe, the reading is deeply opinionated, highly falsifiable, and can cut to the truth more quickly and more spookily than any other system of sense-making I know of.
This is done through a deep understanding of the various significations (meanings) of the planets, signs, houses, and aspects, and an experience-won ability to synthesize the multitude of factors at play, emphasizing some and discounting others based on the overall configuration of a chart. (In many cases, there is also no small amount of pure intuition and sometimes unintentional/accidental cold-reading for the more visible parts of the delineation.)
Of course, this is just an overview. I’ve waved past other chart factors that impact interpretation including relative planetary speed, distance from the ecliptic, aspect orbs, waxing/waning aspects, retrogrades, stations, and motion direct, modes, elements, rulership systems, asteroids, and so on. This also disregards the fact that western astrology’s fundamental roots were fractured and lost to time for decades and only now are undergoing a renaissance that incorporates highly technical and precise factors like planetary condition/strength, sect, solar phase, polarity/gender, alternate rulership systems, bounds/terms, decans, lots, planetary phases, solar/lunar phase cycles, maltreatment and bonification, time lord systems, primary directions and holy shit there’s so much.
Sure, I’m throwing a bunch of technical terms at you to sound impressive, but that’s my point. The entire discipline of daily horoscope astrology, or, as it’s sometimes derisively called, “sun sign astrology”, can be distilled into a couple books or a dozen Instagram accounts. Aries mad, Taurus eat, Gemini talk, Cancer sensitive, Leo cocky, Virgo perfectionist, Libra glamorous, Scorpio horny/vengeful, Sagittarius flaky, Capricorn business, Aquarius kooky, Pisces drugs. No one should (or could) live their life off of this system. Encapsulating the “entirety” of astrology’s true systems requires dozens, hundreds of books to encapsulate, and even then, it’s a living body of knowledge people are constantly adding to with their own experience. Of course, that experiental learning is a huge obstacle to astrology’s legitimacy and even simple data collection. More on that later.
Astrology’s implications
This issue isn’t about how astrology works, nor proving that it does. I already covered how I showed statistically significant correlations between stock market action and astrological configurations to my own satisfaction in a prior newsletter. Instead, this issue is about what it means that astrology works at all, and what that does to our conception of the world and reality itself. And by “work”, I mean that astrology functionally correlates and/or predicts the experiences of our lives according to the significations described by planetary configuration. (And if that’s outside your wheelhouse, just treat it as an abstract thought experiment.)
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of my skepticism about astrology was reading case studies about family or dynasty astrology, wherein astrological patterns repeated themselves in the charts of family members, sometimes to the point of key planets ending up on the exact same degree in the zodiac that you could point to between parent and child. (Well, almost–the final nail was when I looked at my own chart and one of my parent’s and a life-long dynamic suddenly became wildly, apparently obvious in the charts.) The notion that familial patterns of trauma, abuse, love, sympathy, antipathy, and everything else would just happen to be so perfectly aligned and represented by traditional significations of their astrological factors defined literally millennia ago by utter coincidence was simply too much for me. My head exploded and everything popped. (There was also that time I got a tiny kitten and it turned out said kitten was like 16 years old, had kidney problems, was extremely sweet but needy, and passed away within 10 months. Only in retrospect did I realize that I decided to choose her at the worst possible time, astrologically speaking, with indications that literally mean “death of small animals and pets”. Alas, Ramona. I miss you, even in your need.)
stairs in a castle, Jana Rieckhoff
So this poses questions. Questions like, do we even have free will? (TL;DR answer to that one: yes, don’t think about it too much.) What does it mean that because of the date of Valentine’s day, we have so many Scorpio births? Does the “birth” chart of a nation correlate to its people’s and administration’s cultural values? Do different countries have different concentrations of primary Sun personality types because of key holidays? Is there a correlation to OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism) personality factors? How about the dark triad/tetrad? Western astrology is fundamentally geocentric; would living on Mars require a new, Mars-centric system of astrology? Does the fact that astrology “works” mean that there’s some hidden, as of yet undiscovered superluminal “magnetic force” spiraling from the planets (I don’t buy it but atm who the fuck knows) or does it imply that there’s some correlative synchronistic parallel mechanism going on behind the universe? (Either possibility is existentially overwhelming.)
If souls are a thing, did we actually choose this particular life or are we just randomly stuffed into personalities and situations for the hell of it that happens to be described by the stars? By what mechanism do the events in my life perfectly dovetail with the life of another? Why, and how, is compatibility so perfectly described between two charts? Why in the fuck do certain purely symbolic techniques–for instance, progressions, where you advance a natal chart one day for every year of life in order to describe major events that happen–work at all? What’s in a day, a number, the revolution of the sky, the denouement of the moon? What does it mean about our lived experience that any of this shit works at all?
If you spend too much time thinking about it, your head fucking explodes. It’s all too impossible, too grand, and yet it’s right there, an undeniable splinter in a perfect picture of a bleak, uncaring, materialistic universe.
That’s not to say it’s all cotton candy and daisies, of course. Any robust system for painting a picture of life and reality must include the other side: ugliness, darkness, survival, trauma, abuse, fear, suffering, pain, death. It’s hard to envision a spiritual system in which anybody would choose to be born prematurely and die minutes later. It’s equally hard to envision a system in which strange, correlative and synchronistic mechanisms exist without rhyme, reason, or purpose. I keep falling back to a John Lily quote: “Cosmic Love is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not.” But that’s not knowing, that’s coping. So I put on my programmer/STEM hat and turn back to the “small” problem: what can we predict, reliably, by applying statistics to astrology? Could we build tools that enable us to live better lives with something as simple as a notification that says: “DON’T DO ANYTHING IMPORTANT TODAY”, or: “IT’S A GOOD NIGHT FOR A ZOOM DATE”?
No, not really. Not in a way I find satisfying, because of astrology’s data problem.
Astrology’s data problem
Astrology has a data problem. (That’s three times I said it. It’s a big deal!) While there is generally broad agreement of many astrological factors’ significations, there’s plenty of disagreement over when to emphasize which meanings, or the degree to which to emphasize them, or the conjoining/confounding factors involved. As I mentioned in the first part, there are a vast number of potential factors to consider, and each of those factors have their own ranges of possible values.
Book of Saint Cyprian (viruses), Rui Martins
For example, you have a planet that could be in one of 12 signs, one of 30 degrees per sign, under one of 8+ aspects from one (or more) 9+ other planets, moving faster or slower relative to its average speed, within one of 12 houses, and so on. I’m no data scientist, but your average neural network will be hard-pressed to make sense of such a highly dimensional possibility space that can be impacted by factors that only appear once in a given sample (a natal chart being considered a sample), and when that factor can be confounded by other factors in different situations. I’m skeptical that you could create a model that would be able to predict any particular event or personality attribute, but even if you could, extracting which component factors are responsible for that prediction seems utterly impossible. IANADS (I Am Not A Data Scientist) and all that, but my current understanding is that we have to go smaller, focusing on the events that are as black and white as possible, until there’s a corpus of tested data that can be relied upon as truth–at least while Pluto is in Capricorn.
Even when solving a small problem, such as predicting likely times of marriage or injury, gathering enough data samples is tricky; it’s hard (impractical? unethical?) to ask people to share vast amounts of personal information about their lives for you to classify organize in a database, because of how important timing is. Data points must be accurate to the day, ideally the hour, to be worth anything. Historical data recalled by memory simply isn’t reliable, and it’s a lot to ask someone to do data entry while they’re saying their vows or bleeding.
Don’t get me wrong, these are technically solved problems, just not with computers. If you ask a reputable, professional astrologer to make key predictions about your life in areas that they have experience with (marriage, children, romance, job callings, money, making a big move, etc.), they can give you highly relevant and well-tuned advice and sometimes outright predictions. But these are still human perspectives that are simply slices of the whole picture; different skilled astrologers are likely to agree on main points but give you different shades of grey, and none of them know everything.
My deep aspiration is to build a system that can build, with an explicit sureness percentage, give predictions or guidance on any area of life. But what happens if such a system both exists and works? Perhaps it shouldn’t.
The Dystopia of Astrology
Finally, we’re here. Mercury, lord of wisdom, messenger of the gods (and therefore astrology), Thrice Great Hermes, also rules luck, trickery, mischief, and the breakage of the internet when in a foul mood. Anyone who works in the haunted realms of magic is at least experientially familiar with the nature of the Trickster, whereby grand truths and deep powers are hinted at but playfully elude a mechanical grasp, preferring to delightfully tease the mind.
The power of a working, useful, automated astrological predictive system is all-encompassing and profound. Lately, I’ve been particularly interested in the realm of death astrology, whereby an astrologer tries to predict key times during which someone could die (as far as any astrologer I’ve read knows, there are no definite indicators of death, just key areas where death is particularly likely). Part of the attraction is the pure morbidity; the other is the fact that the most discrete data set you can find in an astrology database is the time that someone was born and the time that person died. While I’m driven on by the Icarian hunger for knowledge and to just see if it’s possible, a dark corner of my mind imagines a world where astrological prediction is fully integrated into insurance companies, actuarial services, bullshit misapplied business-compliance “personality” quizzes and ad networks.
Can you imagine if Target not only knew you were likely to have a child not only because of your shopping habits but because Jupiter is transiting your fifth house of children? If an ad network knew to show you kink gear because of your natal chart? If a facial recognition system could reverse-engineer your personality using astrophysiognomy-trained AI models?
The experience of proving the statistical significance of astrology to myself in the stock market and then being able to make no money off of it because it yielded no actionable information was a distinctly Mercurial, Trickster-like experience. Maybe such a thing is too powerful, can’t exist. Apps like Co-Star, Sanctuary, and The Pattern are coming at the astrology industry (aww, man…) from various angles, but only The Pattern comes close to eerily accurate yet still a little too vague predictions that are based on “cycles” (astrology). And the myriad of traders who swear by Gann angles (astrology), Fibonacci sequences (magical numbers), and Elliott wave systems (probably also astrology) may make money doing so, but it’s difficult to tell since so much of the application depends more on the individual than the system.
I have the distinct feeling that working in this area that I call computational astrology is going to end up being my life’s work. I’m hopeful that I can create something that can significantly, and profoundly impact someone’s own life, and even change their mind about what the world is and what is possible through the sheer evidence of it working. I’m also particularly wary of the damage that can be caused by a system that is too accessible, too powerful, too effective, too easy to co-opt to capitalism’s wants. The more time I spend working with(/living in) technology, the more I fear it, and the more I wonder if this wasn’t all a giant mistake.
Of course, the stars–particularly Jupiter and Saturn conjoining for the next 200 years in air signs, ruling technology, information, and communication starting in Aquarius–make no judgments. They just travel, hurl their beams, and point.