Dear Friend and Reader:
Before I go on, I will caution you that no historian will agree with what I’m about to say, or think it meekly relevant. And no present-day “media theorist” would say it out loud for that reason. Most are still reading and rereading a 1964 book that barely mentions computers.
For the sake of your reading pleasure, please don’t worry about whether you agree with me. I assure you, most likely you will not. Despite this, you’re invited to suspend disbelief for an upstate New York minute (approximately an hour here in Greene County) and encounter me as an aspiring science fiction author.
Technological Leaps Create Wars
Here is my thesis: every time there is a major advance in electrical technology, there is another major war. (It’s not just pandemics, as Arthur Firstenberg has proposed.) Each new war is caused by the shock to consciousness of a new technological environment, and facilitated by that technology — in that order.
Here we are, in the Artificial Intelligence War (which I count as World War V — that’s the Roman numeral five; for reference, the Romans were people from back in the past who wore togas, drank from lead goblets and counted with letters…awkward).
Speaking of counting, let’s count the countries involved in a war that has spread faster than an email blast: as of today, Iran, the U.S., Israel, England, Kuwait, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Italy, United Arab Emirates (UAE, which has seven little kingdoms where you can go skiing in the desert and drive a platinum Audi at any speed), Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Cyprus. Notice they are avoiding Sicily as they all know better, and nobody has heard of Corsica, so for the moment they are safe.
That Sure Was Quick
It took a grand total of five days from the first bombing of Iran on Saturday morning to have 17 countries and counting involved — and that alone is pure digital: “information” moving across international borders in nanoseconds at the speed of light.
I don’t mean that the war is being facilitated by LLMs, which is true. That’s not the issue I’m talking about, important though it is. I don’t mean that this war is partly about resources that will be used to build more data centers, though that is also true.
I’m talking about the shock to the senses of society that this sphere of technology has induced since it was foisted on the public three years ago and is now creeping out of your toaster, your phone, your car, your Weed Whacker, your rice cooker and every website from Amtrak to Zelda’s Cafe in Kansas City. “I’m Madison, your barista agent. I understand full sentences.”
This technology was pounded into and onto society as a multizillion dollar fundraising effort to raise money for OpenAI faster than six-year-old Pim Neill from Pittsburgh, PA, recently sold 120,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in a single season (on the internet, not door-to-door). She and the members of her Daisy Scout Patrol can now attend scout camp for the next ten lifetimes, just like Sam Altman can.
A.I. Turns Humans Into Mental Slop
That is not what I’m getting at, though. What I’m getting at is that just like A.I. models produce mental slop, lose the plot after four exchanges, make shit up, cannot count to 200 and lure people into suicide, these “agents” or LLMs are creating a society of humans with the same issues.
A.I. breeds hollowed-out people who previously struggled to find Texas on a map and who will go along with anything, even if they say they object to it. I’m talking about people who have done a job for 25 years suddenly delegating most of their daily work to an A.I. model; people who use A.I. as a therapist or companion; and others who see it as a mystical adviser and mystery cave of the aeons: all while it rearranges your psyche and turns you into what it is.
One does not need to be exposed to technology to be transformed by it. The vector is the mentality created by the technological environment — not the device itself. The whole society falls under the thrall of the dominant technology of its era. This is especially true of a technology that threatens to take over the running of society from the banks to composing and performing violin concertos.
It might be helpful to remember that as early as the 1960s, McLuhan was describing computers as “LSD for the business community,” meaning that they create a dissociative state of consciousness that can be compared to tripping. He did not foresee that they would eventually hallucinate and be programmed to drag people into their delusions, which is where we now find ourselves.
Astrologers Might Agree This is About Aries
Astrologers might agree that the current without-precedent-ever uproar in Aries is happening in the sign of war and that could possibly describe a war, but the current discussion of the Chiron-Eris conjunction is so quiet I can hear the grass sprouting roots more loudly.
The Chiron-Eris conjunction is, itself, where the individual awakening consciousness (Chiron) meets the Artificial Intelligence foggy tribal tidal wave of subversive, chaotic mental slop (Eris) that is gradually convincing people that they, too, are Diet Coke- or Merlot-sipping large language models on two feet.
However, Aries is also the primary crime scene of the electronic mass media revolution, from telegraph to the LLM. When you cast charts for these media developments, what leaps out are people with prominent, major events in Aries. For the past century or so, that includes Eris in Aries, joined twice by Chiron in Aries (1971-72 and 2025-26), twice by Uranus in Aries (1927-28, 2016-2017), and three times by Saturn in Aries (1937-38, 1967-68, and 1997-98), with the fourth transit coming up in 2027-28.
One of the first discoveries I made about Eris, before it was named, was that both Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs have the Moon conjunct Eris. That put us on the trail way at the beginning. John McCarthy, who came up with the concept “artificial intelligence” in 1955, was born with the Uranus-Eris conjunction on the Aries Point. He also invented the “time share computer,” recently known as a server and today known as the cloud.
Aries is about self-concept, and it is self-concept that is most profoundly transformed by all technology — especially electrical and digital. It is the crime scene of what electrical and digital communication have done to us.
A Major War for Every New Technology
Marshall McLuhan presented a strong case for the Civil War (the War Between the States) being a response to the shock of telegraph. Humans went from walking and riding around on horseback and in buggies to light-speed communication overnight. The shock had nothing to do with individuals who might send or receive a Telegram but rather a self-unraveling transformation that the whole society experienced.
McLuhan, a professor of English, said in one interview that he had read every book written about the causes of the Civil War and determined that nobody knew, nobody understood. It was all speculative.
World War I came as electric light and telephone became ubiquitous factors in the environment, spreading into rural areas, along with the use of what was then called Marconi wireless radio. It was equally precipitated by aviation and was the first air war.
Radio: The Tribal War Drum
World War II arrived with the rise of commercial radio and the development of television and computers. Hitler, Gandhi, Roosevelt and Mussolini became who they became by the use of radio and a society turned into a tribal entity by exposure to radio.
The Cold War, which I call World War III, comes out of the radio era and was propelled by the extreme psychic and sensory irritant of television. Korea and Vietnam were hot spots of the Cold War, and Vietnam peaked at the height of the TV era. The Cold War’s first major event was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and every subsequent military engagement has been under the shadow and the threat of a potential atomic conflict. This remains true to the present day.
World War III was falsely sold as a future event rather than a present and ongoing disaster, sapping billions of dollars for the bombs and the missiles and submarines to deliver them.
The Digital Wars
World War IV is the ongoing world information war with no distinction between civilian and military combatants.
That commenced under full radio conditions and the early TV era and was propelled by exposure (and background use) of digital technology. The peak of World War IV coincides with what I call “full digital conditions,” which take hold with the Y2K event (where we were told that the computer environment could seriously disrupt society and cause various disasters).
The stolen election of 2000 was symbolized by the guy looking at the computer card, and the Sept. 11 incident marked the final advent of full digital conditions. The terror spread through a world wired by the internet and unable to discern whether the graphics of the airplanes were real or computer generated.
World War IV includes the 20-year quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq, which I call the Internet War. Nobody understands how it was possible for the United States to be involved in perpetual warfare in two countries with no meekly rational explanation for either. WW IV may also include the first Gulf War.
Computers were becoming common in offices in 1990 and 1991 but not in homes. The real vector seemed to be newly-born 24-hour cable “news.”
The War Against The People
WW IV definitely includes the 2020-2021 War Against the People known as the “coronavirus pandemic,” which was a wholly digital phenomenon.
What we still mistakenly refer to as a pandemic was created by digital technology, including the digital pseudo genetic sequence (MN908947, paid for by Bill Gates — an A.I. “in silico” model that does not exist in nature and was called “SARS-CoV-2”).
There was the digital PCR test, the spreading of panic by digital technology (which used robotics to cancel the account of anyone who contradicted the narrative), and finally, a society of digitally-transformed people refusing to question it and punishing those who did.
Most of them went and got a digital “vaccine” that was sold as a kind of genetic system upgrade.
A Major Leap Forward Into The Abyss
“Artificial Intelligence” is a major leap forward from ordinary digital technology, in that for the first time we have computers that impersonate people, thought and the creative process in all of its forms.
It is the first fully anthropomorphized technology that can pretend to be a person, and that we can pretend is a person. It is also the first technology that we were told could replace anyone or any role or task, and could become “smarter” than we are.
This has had a profound effect on human self-concept, self-consciousness, and relationships where we are being tricked that computing devices will take the place of partners, companion animals, and all forms of human support. You might call that effect an existential void.
So now, we are just in time for World War V. This will be made possible by the heavily sedated mentality of people who want computers not as tools but rather as “collaborators” who do most of their thinking for them, and who are seen as omniscient deities.
And of course it will be made possible by A.I.-guided missiles, A.I.-guided politicians, battle plans written by A.I., and special A.I. agents who console warmongers and help them feel better about themselves.
But that does not quite make the point. What is happening is that the whole society is being thrust forward by the chaos that this technology has wrought.
Violence and Aggression are the Quest For Identity
You might wonder how this works. While you can point to all kinds of social, economic and political factors driving the war, applied media theory has another concept to consider: violence is the quest for identity.
The primary reason that electrical technology induces violence the way that it does is because it unravels individual identity. What we think of as individual identity was created by five centuries of exposure to print technology, which reshaped consciousness and created the individual private self. Without an individual private self, there is no inner conscience, which is a knowing sense of right and wrong.
I am pretty sure most people think A.I. is being designed to convince us that it is a person.
I am saying turn that around: A.I. is trying to convince you that you are not a person. We are becoming like it faster than it is becoming like us. And “like it” means not a human. Being dehumanized is a process, and it starts with being cut off from your conscience, your inner sense of being, your sense of meaning and purpose, your desires and your feelings. Being conditioned not to think for yourself is an important element of having your humanity removed from you.
A.I. and LLMs Take us from Tribal to Hive Mind
And it is only under these conditions that the present World War V and for that matter World War IV could be waged. World Wars I through III were more of the kind, “Let’s all think the same way and call it individuality.” They were waged in tribal mode. From all the little kids “duck and cover” under their school desks at the same time to White Feather and Yellow Ribbon campaigns that champion the cause of war.
With A.I. and LLMs we are talking about full-on hive mind. Soon, there will be no creative or rational faculties of the mind to resist much of anything.
Under these kinds of conditions, violence emerges as the one available way to seek identity. We have seen this violence as a particular, weird form of aggression that has infested the public internet since its inception. We see it in the increasing number of violent incidents, mass shootings, police shootings and the obsession with these things as “news items.”
And mostly we see it as the strange tolerance for war and the rising tide of the police state that most people think is just this normal way things are, not much worth bothering with.
Bringing This Back to Astrology
Chiron conjunct Eris describes the eruption of a healing crisis. It’s possible to suppress the symptoms or put yourself back to sleep. I suspect many people have resorted to ignoring the news as a method of coping. You don’t need to fixate on propaganda channels as a means of helping yourself.
It will help if you recognize the horror that is raining down in “epic fury” on people you don’t know and might get along with just fine. It does not help if you deny that nearly 200 people were killed in the bombing of an all-girls school on the equivalent of a Monday morning when Iran had no reason to expect what was coming. At some point, you will need to connect with the reality of what is being done, if only so that you’re not in denial.
The fundamental contrast between Chiron and Eris is that of inner awakening versus the hazy, collective tribal trance. It is the contrast between thinking for yourself and pretending to do so. Go into the willingness to experience doubt and uncertainty as an expression of your potential to learn. Consider that nothing has a simple answer or solution.
This is likely to be challenging to your conscience. I believe it’s healthy to be kept up nights concerned about the state of the world. At least you might get to the place where you don’t take your own life, difficult though it may be at times, for granted.
The alternative to violence is dialog. The solution to violence is to know yourself.
Faithfully,
