In her book BTS, Art Revolution: BTS Meets Deleuze, Lee Jiyoung talks about the ways in which a technology (BTS) creates a people (Army). Marshall McLuhan writes that fascism could not have thrived in the 1930s if it weren’t for the radio. Early Soviet cinema creates a sense of national identity and belonging where there hadn’t been before.

Technology creates not only representation but also identity. Visible identity often becomes a shorthand for community—not a community of people who you know or live with but a theoretical community. The queer community. The immigrant community.

When I was growing up, the anxious new technology was the personal blog. There was still leftover nervousness around what TV was doing to “our children” but that’s more of a gen x issue. Gen x are described as hypnotized, as fanatics of mainstream things, and rageful in populist ways. Millennials grew up on Livejournal and by penning long letters on a friend’s Facebook wall. This is why we think that millennials are dramatic, emo, and trying too hard to be special. Today, the idea of writing such long blog posts about ourselves is gauche. It’s as gauche as the nude, which we are nervous about because our professional lives and survival lives are suddenly digital right alongside our emo, horny, and angry selves.

The technology that we worry about today is not the personal cell phone. It’s not the computer. It’s not a machine—it’s the algorithm.

The people that the algorithm tries to generate is a predictable people. It’s not just that the algorithm tracks who we are. It’s that the algorithm tells us who we are. It tells us what should feel relatable to us, what catchphrases we should all be referring to, and what the proper reaction to the nebulous territory of expressing an emotion should be. What the algorithm professes to do is to organize content but what it actually does is that it creates identity.

There are only three websites for people nowadays, it seems. There were hundreds when I was growing up. All of the content circulated on these three websites are screencaps and reposts of content from the other two. We talk about Youtube on Twitter and we talk about Twitter on Instagram. We repost Tiktoks on all three.

The world that the algorithm tries to predict is unpredictable. It is a precarious, uncertain, and impossible to know world. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. If capital is the ability to create a future, then we lack capital. It is in this world that the algorithm tries to generate a predictable people.

Astrology is implicit in this. Astrology is community care but it also exists as content on the internet. Astrology is a community and it can serve as an identity. Astrology memes, poems, and art is organized by algorithms. Astrology is a language that gives you a way to describe who you can be but it is also a technology that can try to tell you who you are.

People are not predictable. Gen z is not nihilism and catchphrases. Millennials are not emo and obsessed with attention. Gen x is not all angry and deceived. People are not our identities, even when we often have to live as though we are in the workplace, in our bedrooms, and on the internet.

There is a way of using language that is about repetition. When languages are repeated, they become boring. They become diagnostic and they are easily organized by the algorithm. But you don’t create change when you use a language through repetition—by repeating words and motifs and grammar that already exists.

The only way to truly use a language, the only way to truly reproduce it, is by changing its meaning while using it. This is why the best writing surprises you—because the best way to use a language is to change the meaning of the words, motifs, and grammar of the thing while you are in the middle of using it.

Divination is not predictable because people are not predictable. The predictable person that the algorithm imagines you to be is a corporate fiction. Divination is a language that serves the purpose of creating change. Divination is not an algorithm. It does not diagnose, screen, or sooth via tracking. Divination is for a unpredictable people living in uncertain times. It does not give you a future but asks that you imagine your own.