May 2012
And a Child Shall Lead Them
Mark Zuckerberg was in the news a few weeks ago, on the day Pluto (plutocracy) stationed during its narrowing square to Uranus (technology). Facebook’s acquisition of a smart phone app for a billion dollars had the business page so excited it could hardly contain itself.
The New Yorker chimed in with a timely Jewish parents joke: “Are the Zuckerbergs now thrilled that Mark never went outside and got some fresh air?”
Social Networth1
When his star first started to rise, Zuckerberg struck many people as very, well, young to be a billionaire.2 Before he and his ilk came along, that particular financial demographic was invariably associated in the collective imagination with old men: elderly WASP millionaires (here’s another change: the <m> on that word has morphed into a <b>). These were represented in the visual vernacular by a well-fed gent with white whiskers, a top hat and a monocle.
In currency for as long as any of us could remember, that figure showed up illustrating every editorial ever written about rich people. He’s the dude from the Monopoly game; he’s Walt Disney’s Scrooge McDuck. His origin was probably Thomas Nast’s seminal cartoon of the 19th-century fat cat Boss Tweed, a corpulent Edwardian toff with a sack of money for a face. This jolly stereotype is nothing if not durable. You can still see it in political cartoons, symbolizing the 1%.
But the cliché is being revised, as Zuckerberg and his peers push the age of the moneybags demographic downward. The imagery in the mass mind of extreme wealth gets younger with each new start-up that goes platinum.
This phenomenon reflects an interesting trend: a rise in the cultural stock of young people in general, which started in the rock-and-rolling Sixties.
Uranus & Pluto Then and Now
As transit trackers are aware, the energy of the 1960s is resonating strongly right now, due to what we might call a cosmic echo. The transit that gave those wild years their unique power – Uranus conjunct Pluto opposed to Saturn — is back, with its ingredients remixed.
In 2010, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto reconvened in what was called the Cardinal Climax (Uranus opposed to Saturn, both square to Pluto); and now, in 2012, Uranus and Pluto are reaching the first of their seven exact 90º angles. The seeds of social disruption, planted in the sixties, are breaking through the crust of the soil.
Generation Gap
To understand the significance of this new phase of the Uranus-Pluto cycle we need to consider the phase that began it.
When the planet of revolution (Uranus) conjoined with the planet of breakdown (Pluto) back in ‘65, energies were unleashed, like agents provocateurs, to challenge the social order. Sex was famously let out of the closet. Anything that could be construed as an establishment value got challenged, from fashion to politics.
Of interest here is the constituency that was causing the ruckus: It was the young people. The Uranus-Pluto conjunction initiated a wrenching chasm between teenagers and their parents. It was under this transit that the phrase “the generation gap” was coined.
The concept was as exciting (Uranus) as it was dangerous (Pluto) to the social order, and it caught on fast. In the Western world, the abyss between the generations spread like a earthquake fault, to every sort of family of every social class.
While it is true that there have always been youngsters who rebelled against their elders, what was different about this singular moment in history was that it became normative to do so. Whether this was ever statistically verified, I don’t know; but the impact of the idea upon (especially) American culture was manifestly obvious: young and old were at each other’s throats. Musically, linguistically, politically, sartorially, they occupied two incompatible realities.
The obedient sons and daughters of previous generations, epitomized by the clean, smiling kids on “Father Knows Best” and other goodie-two-shoes TV families, were now the exception, not the rule. A generation earlier, it would have been preposterous for a young songwriter to pen the lyric “Teach your parents well,” as Crosby, Stills and Nash did in the late ‘60s.
Values Gap
Opposition to the war in Viet Nam took the form of an almost-monolithic generation of young people rising up en masse. The war became a symbol of the stupidity and moral vacuity of the generation in power at the time: the protesters’ parents. The new cultural cliché was that, if you were an adolescent or in your twenties, you were still uncorrupted enough to see clearly and act morally, which for a lot of us meant espousing anti-materialism and anti-militarism.
If you were older than young, on the other hand, you were presumed to personify not only the standard-issue cluelessness of old age, but a lamentable ethical blindness as well. Of this you were guilty until proven innocent. We were warned by Abbie Hoffman, of the Chicago Seven, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”. “I hope I die before I get old,” sang Pete Townsend of the Who.
We thought being young was a moral stand.
Wired World
The most momentous configuration to occur in between the time of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction (1965-66) and the Cardinal Cross upon us now (2008-2023) was the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993. Here we had the planet of cutting-edge machines (Uranus) and the planet of mass consciousness (Neptune) coming together to birth the tech revolution.
In an astoundingly short time, relative to human timescales, this revolution has resulted in advanced machines (Uranus) insinuating themselves into every nook and cranny of people’s lives everywhere in the world (Neptune).
Moreover, in a way that the Black Panthers could not have dreamed of when they chanted “The Revolution will not be televised,” the revolution is being digitalized. Uranus (revolution) in Aries (activism) and Pluto (breakdown) in Capricorn (government) were moving into their first-quarter square in early 2011 as the uprisings in Yemen spread to Tahrir Square, a revolution that was famously enabled by the internet.
The information revolution has moved into the realm of political.
Post-Millennial Generation Gap
For those of us alive before the cyber revolution began, it was impossible to imagine the breadth of the social change it would trigger. Correspondingly, to anyone who came of age since 1993, the old pre-digital world must be well-nigh impossible to imagine. Here we have the second iteration, in my lifetime, of the generation gap.
Observing it from the other side of the geriatric line this time, I notice some key distinctions. The ethical factor, that seemed so important a distinction between old and young back in the day, is no longer part of the formula. If cultural attitudes towards materialism and militarism are starting to spike again, it is not because they are attached to any particular age group.
Young Turks in Silicon Valley are certainly not looked down upon by their peers for making oodles of money. On the contrary, in the Age of Zuckerberg, enormous, insouciant wealth is cool again. During the days of flower power, by contrast, going into business – especially advertising — was regarded as selling out.
Things have gotten a bit more complicated since then. A business or a tech degree is considered, by and large, the most “realistic” choice in these days of the Great Recession. Literature and art courses, by contrast, are dropping like flies in college curricula. The complexion of youthful idealism is very different in an economy where student loan debt, having surpassed credit card and auto-loan debt in the USA, is surging above a trillion dollars.
Digital Divide
There is a digital divide in the world right now, between societies affluent enough to wire themselves and those that are lucky to have one old typewriter per village. This is a new spin on global inequality, one that is often remarked upon by economists. But within First World societies like the USA, where access to digital technology is the overwhelming norm, the more noteworthy divide is the one between the generations.
It has often been observed, especially by us oldsters, that young people seem to understand computer technology not simply because they’re habituated to it, having grown up around these machines, but because they actually think differently. The idea is both daunting and fascinating, and it seems surprising that more social scientists and neurologists aren’t pursuing it.
Astrologers, for their part, would propose that young people growing up since the Uranus-Neptune conjunction understand the new media because the understanding is in their DNA. The internet is changing not only the ways we use information but the whole phenomenon of human intelligence itself. The new generation gap is not merely technical, nor cultural, but epistemological.
Today’s young people are curiously positioned, with a facility that is highly valued by the world at large. Graham Nash’s call to “Teach your parents well” is being played out in front of family computer screens all over the world.
Note:
1 Hats off the wordsmiths at The Daily Show.
2 A related issue is how little dudes like Zuckerberg pay back into the public pot, relative to their wealth, under the USA’s heavily 1%-favoring tax codes. According to journalist Tim Redmond, Zuckerberg is exercising $5 billion worth of stock options out of $28 billion he will own; requiring him to pay 40 percent on that five billion but not a penny of tax on the other $23 billion. This makes his actual effective tax rate about 7 percent – far less than even low-income Americans typically pay.