Dear Friend and Reader:
I’ve been cautioning about the tsunami of propaganda that is drenching and drowning society. Besides being so obvious nobody is noticing, this is based on a specific aspect pattern that is activated by Saturday’s Aries Full Moon.
That would be Neptune on the high-magnification Aries Point, in a conjunction with slow-mover Borasisi, a small planet located just beyond Pluto’s orbit. Borasisi had its first big moment in 2011, when I introduced it to Planet Waves readers one week ahead of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
I began that article, “Anyone who works with ideas in a public forum figures out sooner or later that most people will believe anything, particularly if it’s not true.”
It’s named for a deity in the novel Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which has its origins in something Vonnegut found in the public relations files of General Electric when he worked there in the 1950s. The Fukushima reactors were manufactured by GE. The whole article is prescient, verging on predictive, of that event.
Cat’s Cradle is the perfect (short) novel, and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s a satirical morality tale for our moment.
Neptune Conjunct Borasisi
Now Neptune and Borasisi are conjunct on the personal/collective amplifier known as the Aries Point. Neptune, the lord of drink, drugs, denial, delusion, diffusion, confusion, illusion and perhaps a little inspiration, is essentially spreading the Borasisi fog to the masses.
Therefore, it’s time to consider what it’s really like living in a mass media environment of all lies, all the time, on every channel. But it’s not just the content (as we call it today). We now live in the middle of a massive Large Language Model, the specialty of which is stripping words from meaning.
Whatever the topic, some vast percentage of the internet is written by water-gobbling bullshit machines, which spew out torrents of words devoid of thought, feeling, intent or any semblance to an idea. What is falsely being called “artificial intelligence” lacks all of these things.
But worst among its properties is that from a computer science standpoint, it generates words that exist without any connection to meaning whatsoever.
The Special Point Poseidon and the Full Moon
The aspect pattern also includes the Uranian point Poseidon. This is the last of the 20th century “hypotheticals” that I’ve gradually fallen in love with over the past 30 years of working with them, first as an experiment. Now they are just funny.
Poseidon is a kind of super-Neptune, the last discovered (and long kept secret) of these ultra-slow-moving mathematical entities imported from Germany. Martha Lang-Wescott (author of The Architects of Time) pointed out to me that Poseidon is in a seemingly endless 135-degree (sesquiquadrate) aspect to Neptune.
This mutually triggering aspect presents the perfect image of the media environment that’s engulfing us — which means the entire technology environment, drowning society so deeply as to make Atlantis seem like the Sahara Desert.
So now we have four factors: The Aries Point, Neptune, Borasisi and Poseidon.
And on Saturday, this will be at high tide, lit up by the Aries New Moon. The question is not what will happen but rather, what is happening?
A.I. and the End of the World
For the past couple of weeks, the issue of whether “artificial intelligence” will lead to the extinction of humanity has been casually bobbing around at the top of the news. One day last week there were multiple articles on top of The New York Times home page, which is my bellwether for what we think is supposed to matter.
This included Prince Charming hosting several tech leaders in Scotland to discuss the issue, feasting on delicious Jammy Dodgers.
Trump Tuesday was threatening to annihilate Iran, and A.I. leaders are raising hundreds of billions on the promise that they will annihilate all of us.
This tells you about marketing in the digital environment. A CEO raises capital on a 6,000 word “white paper” about how dangerous his company’s product is. That’s their way of saying “this water-gobbling, suicide-inducing bullshit machine is really, really special.”
By the way, this story is nothing new. As you may know, Planet Waves ran a daily blog on the “covid” crisis for 1,195 days, preserving thousands of news references related to that pathetic situation. This was called Covid19 News.
The very last article we posted, on our last day of publication, May 31, 2023, was picked up from BBC: “Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity, say tech experts.” Yes that was just six months after the release of ChatGPT. So this issue goes back to the beginning. Talk about violence as the quest for identity. Our useless product is special because it might kill all of us — taken as a selling point.
The Problem with Every A.I. Danger Theory
The problem with every single A.I. danger theory is that it entirely misses the point — that being, what the real problem is. Apart from humanity’s love affair with the concept of its own extinction (make it stop!), the more serious issue is not being recognized.
These discussions always cast any problem as being in the future, not in the present or historical. It’s always about what might happen years from now. I am talking about what already exists. The problems are also seen to be collective, or societal, and I am saying that they’re about us as individuals and our most intimate relationships.
Society has been under the influence of digital toxins for more than 70 years, and the “server” (then called a “time-share computer” and now called “the cloud”) was invented by the same person who came up with the term “artificial intelligence.”
It’s all The Robot, it really takes hold with Google, and it was cooked to perfection by Instagram that initiated its A.I. algorithm seizing the minds of kids starting in late 2010. Then by 2020 we were dealing with swarms of “fact checking” robots, which were really A.I. agents.
The newer problem of the Large Language Model is that it separates words from meaning. The LLM knows nothing. It can come up with marvelous ersatz language, which is completely divorced from human context, feeling, time, memory, the senses, experience, and the actual world itself.
Said simply, it separates words from meaning, with some absurd portion of the words you read every day created by LLMs. The issue is less the idiots who think such a thing is helpful, but rather that we are drowning in language that only seems to mean something.
It reminds me of a bee clinging to a yellow potato chip package in the autumn hoping for a little nectar. But far worse.
And The Issue Takes Residence In Our Minds
This is propaganda of a special kind, propagating in our minds like exposure to dry cleaning fluid (perchloroethylene) and other solvents that strip the myelin sheaths from our brains and nerves, leading to neurological diseases.
Some just think it’s cool to gab with their phone since they finally have a friend in our times of isolation and loneliness.
The ultimate mental fraud is to strip words from meaning; this is commonly known as a lie, but a lie at least has intent and might be revealed. The problem with LLMs is that everything they say is fundamentally a lie, and they’re being treated as the new digital god.
People whine, then ask ChatGPT for dating advice, to organize their schedule for them, to plan lectures or to edit their articles.
Environmental problems are invisible, and what I am talking about is one. Not the slop language, but the language stripped of any connection to reality then presented to the world as real.
This is Continued Digital Disembodiment
As Eric McLuhan once wrote, “The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted.”
This manifests many ways, including as the incomprehensible stupidity and insanity of the world right now. It manifests not just as Trump threatening the nuclear annihilation of Iran, which did nothing to the United States, but that anyone at all might think this is somehow appropriate.
Violence is the quest for identity. Digital media deplete identity and the result is violence, which most people then take as a normal part of the environment. It’s considered normal to be detached from one’s body. This is evocative of the Hungry Ghost of Buddhist fame, but it’s more like the Raging Ghost.
Clavicular Charged with Rape and Drugging a Girl
You may not have heard of Clavicular, but he is probably the most important “influencer” of his generation. A product of the digital world and a little biology, he was born in 2005. He came up with the concept of “looksmaxxing,” and is the guy who smashed his face into masculine handsomeness.
This was all to allegedly make him more attractive to the opposite sex. You could say that his influence has been profound, or that he is the embodiment and personification of the digital insanity that has spread through much of the world.
Clavicular was charged earlier this month with drugging a young woman, giving her vodka on a livestream, and then raping her when she was blacked out. He denies this, despite the parts preserved in video (which include him injecting her face with what was said to be a fat-melting substance).
His actions are one thing; what they say about the environment we are in is another. The issues with young adults in their 20s (digital natives, who don’t remember a time without computers) run wide and deep. The most serious part of this is what is considered normal. And the entire Clavicular trip is counted as just the way things are. I am curious to see how his peers respond to this.
Everyone knows about the antipathy, mutual mistrust, outright hatred and disgust that is festering between the sexes — especially with entirely desocialized young people. Socializing is one of the most important ways to get to know oneself, build confidence and test boundaries. And now it’s all being run through the robot.
Extreme Visual Bias
The whole “looksmaxxing” issue screams of one thing, besides shallowness and aggression that are the crisis of our times: the extreme visual bias of the digital age.
Everything is dominated by appearance right now. Am I the only person disgusted by the use of filters in dating apps? Or by children becoming cosmetics influencers? Or the absurd use of “beauty enhancers” like lip-fattening substances?
Is it any wonder that men and women have never been less attracted to one another — especially young ones? If a woman thinks having fat lips makes her more attractive to a potential partner, she’s tripping.
All the elements of real attraction have been canceled: how someone speaks, moves, and smells, for example. And nobody is saying that when you love someone, they become beautiful in your eyes.
That’s part of how you can tell that you love them. In love, there is no such thing as a “mid.” And the obsession with appearance, with seeming beauty, is therefore a substitute for love. And where there is no love, there will be everything else.
If appearance makes you sexually attractive, then rape is unnecessary — unless you remember that violence and aggression are the quest for identity. And the more identity is depleted, the more violent we can expect society to become.
There are alternatives, but first we have to recognize the problem so that it can be solved.
With love,
Your faithful astrologer,
