People born in 1992 and 1993 are currently going through our Saturn returns. This is the 4chan generation who grew up in the days where going online meant that you were engaging in completely anonymous identities that you wouldn’t want your real friends to know, whether that meant being a weeb or being gay or being a white supremacist. We came to age when the internet was sad and desperate—when it was a shadow. This was before anyone built political influence online. It was before resumes went virtual. We knew the internet before it was safe to put our real names on it.
People born in 1992 and 1993 feel we are “different”. We have Saturn in Aquarius. We have always felt that, for whatever reason, no one “gets” us. We anticipate feelings of marginalization whether that marginalization is real or made up. We do not identify with the mainstream, whatever that is.
Because we have Jupiter in either Virgo or Libra, we came to age during the Bush years. We were twelve and going through our first Jupiter returns when Bush was re-elected. We were twenty four and going through our second Jupiter returns when Trump was elected. For those of us who have a debilitated Jupiter, we do not put our political faith in the system. We do not believe that we are ever represented, even if we are.
We are also an age group in which almost a third of the people have Mars in Cancer. Mars retrograded in Cancer somewhere in 1992 and 1993. The people going through their Saturn returns now either have Mars in Cancer or have been influenced by a coming of age culture that was predominantly Cancer Mars.
Mars in Cancer is a tender placement. It’s the fallen Mars placement. Sometimes, the deep political cynicism and alienation of people born in 1992 and 1993 gets translated into radical politics and care as action. Other times, we become clique-ish and xenophobic. People born in 1992 and 1993 are the Mean Girls generation. We care deeply but not about everyone. We are also deeply afraid. We are the terror generation. We all internalized a little bit of the xenophobia that was so en vogue, which was used to justify the police state—even those of us who are foreigners.
For those of us born in 1992 and 1993, the ways that Saturn in Aquarius worked for us during our youth will no longer work for us any longer. We liked to see ourselves as non-participatory, as relegated to the outsides of a system, and as essentially, not accidentally, marginalized. This is a youthful and immature way of looking at the world. It is a tactic of mind that erases our complicity and responsibility. As long as we can find ways to non participate in whatever it is we call society, we can believe that we are not responsible for the things that the adults are guilty of. Until now, we have believed that we will be youth forever.
Saturn return means that the culture we have built is no longer marginal. It doesn’t matter if not everyone knows about boxxy or remembers Allison Harvard. Our tools of communication have grown up and will continue to grow with or without us. We are the subculture generation but there are no longer any subcultures. We are the emo generation that looked to and admired the goths, who all seemed so authentic and real, but even the concept of goth has equalized (pastel goth, dark academia) until it’s become almost meaningless.
We are no longer young and, being no longer young, we cannot think of ourselves as subcultural and naive anymore. We are the adults now. There is no innocence in subculture. In fact, there is often violence and exclusion in subculture. The conspiracy theorists and Trumpers who stormed the capitol all considered themselves to be a part of a subculture—not a mainstream culture. They erased the ways that they are represented and empowered by the mainstream.
I have a love and hate relationship with anonymous. When I was a teenager, anonymous seemed like the coolest person in the world. We could gather! In town squares! In weird masks and talk about niche internet things that the adults didn’t understand. Anonymous is like Saturn in Aquarius—it seeks to discipline not by revealing itself or by participation but by trolling.
After some of the leaders of Anonymous, the hacker entity and not the archetype, were incarcerated, it fell apart a little. A lot of the kids involved became white supremacists. White supremacists have convoluted conspiracy theory-like ways of thinking that did well to attract nerds. They are dogmatic people and dogmatic people always have an emotional need to see themselves as victims. They are unable to owe any accountability to the world that shaped them.
People have power, says the feminists and queers and people of color. People have power, says the white supremacists. People have power, says the trolls who played against Wall Street on Gamestop coins. People have power, says the DNC.
People have power—but power is meaningless. There’s an emptiness to believing that people power will overcome all when majority is not defined by relationship but by rule.
The world is a place that changes based on the people in it. Those of us born in 1992 and 1993 have spaces, whether those are weeb spaces or our group of high school friends, where we feel safe critiquing a system that we imagine we are unable to change. But it is the duty of our Saturns in Aquarius to change. And the act of changing the world is normal and regular because the world changes all the time. It is the act of changing ourselves, as pieces that build a world, that takes real work and an irregular way of thinking.
Vine Deloria wrote that archetypes are moments that represent transformation. Anonymous, that Saturn in Aquarius is an archetype. Anonymous, mask ridden, is a Janus face—it sits on doorways that do not tell you what happens when you walk through the door.
