Break ‘Em Up
Every generation has its traumas. My parents had World War II. My peers and I had Viet Nam and Watergate.
Our children — the generation now in charge — arrived when wars had gone digital and stateless. Their worldview was framed by 9/11. Foreign-policy-wise, those two burning skyscrapers set the template for the American epoch we’re all currently in.
The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. – Medea Benjamin
The younger American millennials are the generation of the Pluto Return. They grew up in the Citizen’s United era, when old-fashioned nationalism was being replaced by multinational corporatocracy. By the time Gen Z arose, late-stage capitalism was off the leash, crashing around like a dinosaur on meth.
And it was wearing a hoodie.
Crumbling into dust
Cosmic cycles made clear long ago that the old paradigms were going to break up during this period. Astrologers who saw it coming didn’t know how it would play out, but it seemed pretty certain that 
federal authority (Capricorn) would start to fall apart around 2008, the year of Pluto’s ingress. This was when Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama’s birth certificate kicked off the political trend that Jelani Cobb has called the “mainstreaming of the absurd.”
The transits suggested that a tipping-point’s-worth of the public were going to start withdrawing their belief in the sturdy old institutions that had glued society together for generations.
Astrologers figured that if there were any scrums of decay still underground by 2020, they’d burst aboveground with the Saturn-Pluto stellium. Party time, Jan 6th dudes!
Kakistocracy
Old-school liberals have been stumbling around in shock about this state of affairs. How could it be that the stupidest, most vicious political mobsters in the 
country had all those passionate fans?
The Pluto-in-Leo generation — Boomers — are old enough to remember when abuses of power like that of bargain-basement kakistocrat Kristi Noem would have torpedoed a politician’s career. But who’s got the psychic bandwidth to track the corruptions of a two-bit governor when the democracy we grew up with has metastasized to the point where a whole presidential election can be declared invalid by the losing side?
The point of the so-called audits is not so much to delegitimize the past election as it is to normalize unnecessary reviews of future ones. — Jelani Cobb
More psychological than political, the campaign afoot seems intended to undermine not just a candidate or party, but all sense of collective cohesion.
Too Big to Contain
“Facebook is too big to fail. Too big to bail. Too big to contain.” — Astrologer Frederick Woodruff
The starkest generational dividing line of all, of course, was everything going digital. This separated whatever life was like before – isn’t it hard to remember? — from everything since. I do recall that twenty years ago, the government couldn’t tap our phone or read our emails without a warrant. Whereas now,
… a not particularly industrious 14-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of KGB agents could sixty years ago. – Chris Hayes
If you grew up opening doors with a metal key, you may view life quite differently from those who’ve grown up with plastic coded cards.
But we’re all living in ZuckerWorld now.
Pope-Emperor
Consider the day FaceBook went down, in early October. Instagram, FaceBook and WhatsApp were hit with “either the most sophisticated & coordinated hack of all time, or the biggest human error ever.” It happened under the Dark of the Moon, and it revealed the Dark of our wired lives.
Even FaceBook’s own employees were caught with their pants down. They couldn’t get into the building because their pass cards wouldn’t work.
Facebook and Instagram going down is like saying a global superpower can’t be located at the moment. — Dave Pell
In a widely noted synchronicity, the outage exactly coincided with FB whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony in Washington. Our dependence upon these platforms was exposed as a grotesque mass addiction, at the very same time that the cynical ruthlessness of their business model was being confirmed by an insider.
The problem isn’t just that Zuck is really bad at being the unelected pope-emperor of the digital lives of 3,000,000,000 people – it’s that the job of “pope-emperor of 3,000,000,000 people” should be abolished. — Cory Doctorow
TechLash
The last two presidential campaigns left no doubt about the impact of the Information/ Disinformation Age on U.S. democracy (not to mention, everywhere else. Check out this excellent report by John Oliver). Also beyond question, at this point, is the psycho-spiritual impact of influencer culture on the self-esteem of the young.
By astrological logic, these things are related (discussed in this webinar). Trumpism and the cult of social-media celebrity were spawned by the same skies.
…the pursuit through fame of a thing that fame cannot provide is more or less the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill. — Hayes, ibid
We are in the middle of a sobering mass realization about the cyber world. The social-media behemoths are now widely seen as a civilizational threat.
Empire killer
Remember that massive planetary line-up in 2020? Its main plot was the merger of government
(Saturn) with even-more-powerful forces (Pluto), a conjunction notorious for killing off empires.
In World War I, a Saturn-Pluto conjunction broke apart four of the world’s Great Powers. A cycle later, it broke apart India and Palestine. This time around, it sealed the deal for Uncle Sam in the empire graveyard of Afghanistan.
But these days, imperialism isn’t so much about countries. Emperors don’t take over the world on battlefields. They do so in cyber space. The new face of Saturn/Pluto is the political and legal omnipotence of the tech monopolies.
Monopoly systems are fragile and dangerous…. Break ’em up.”– Zephyr Teachout, activist and antitrust scholar
The kings must die
Even insanely over-powerful entities eventually crumble, of course. They’re followed, per Natural Law, by something else. After the 1917 iteration of Saturn/Pluto, a new political order arose from the rubble. At the 1947 iteration, a Cold War arose from the ashes of the hot one.
There’s never any guarantee we’ll like the new versions of power any better than the old.
Pluto is always somewhere in the sky. Once it leaves Capricorn, we’ll have to deal with Pluto in Aquarius. It’s not as if the unconsciousness of the human species is going to disappear when a planet changes signs.
Death throes
This period we’re slogging through, like every other little slice of history, features systems in their death throes as well as those struggling to be born.
Granted, we humans tend to find fresh, new energies more palatable than old decaying ones. But in the big picture, it’s silly to apply preferences. The mass breakdowns swirling around us right now are demanding our attention and deserve a creative and dignified response. This is, after all, the era we incarnated into.
Let’s show up for it in our finest funerary robes.