I actually have been thinking quite a bit about the impending/current Pluto in Aquarius transit based on whenever I will share this piece of writing. And maybe I won’t share it like the other pieces of things that sit in my folder of astrology writing that I never bring into the world. I don’t feel that it’s an astrologer’s job to respond to every transit every time and I’ve never personally lived through a hard Pluto transit to my natal Pluto so I hesitate to put any words to this.

Pluto is entering Aquarius on March 23rd. I’m writing this before the transit happens. It’s kind of a dramatic one because Pluto spends so long in each sign. It spends between twelve to thirty years in a sign. Part of being in a time period means that you also cannot perceive that time period clearly.

You know what’s funny about Pluto entering Aquarius? I started brainstorming a queer love story with my partner the other day, one about two competitive lesbians who meet in cram school, and we discovered through our exploration and fun that this was a story about the 2008 recession.

The last time Pluto entered a sign, which was when it entered Capricorn, its ingress coincided with a global recession. Now, that was also a Jupiter in Capricorn transit. It wasn’t just Pluto but both Pluto and Jupiter together. Jupiter entered Capricorn earlier. It entered Capricorn in December of 2007 which was when people first started to default on their mortgages. The next time Jupiter entered Capricorn would be the global pandemic.

Something else really interesting happened back when Pluto first entered Sagittarius. This was in April of 1995 and it was when the internet became a completely privatized system.

I don’t know if you remember this but back in 2008, millennials were considered young. Because we were considered to be young, our ways of interacting and being were also considered to be progressive. Social media, these days thought of either as a complete headache or a surveillance tool of the corporate controlled state, was seen as something that was going to change the world for the better in the early 2000s. People were still using Myspace and Livejournal. Facebook and Twitter were new. Napster and Winrar were big.

The 2008 recession brought in a lot of startups—Uber was created in 2009 and WeWork in 2010. AirBnb came around in 2008. At the time, people who had money wanted to invest their money into something that would grow and they assumed that technology would be it. Rich people wanted technology to come in and save capitalism.

Of course, we know now that none of these enterprises turned out to be profitable. WeWork seemed to literally be a scam. Uber was only just profitable last year but by a tight margin and only if you use the company’s own metrics which seems to hide some expenses. None of these companies were disruptors in the way they wanted to be. WeWork didn’t really change anything about the office rental industry. AirBnb doesn’t really disrupt an industry where most hotel brands already run franchises and don’t shoulder the costs of upkeep.

What is really sad to me is that technology jobs are the only jobs where wages have seemed to at least somewhat have kept up with inflation. Most jobs simply don’t pay enough. A society where people cannot access the resources we need in order to flourish will not be a society that thrives.

Pluto entering Aquarius would create a sextile position to the point at which it first entered Sagittarius in April 1995. It would make a square to where it first entered Scorpio back in November 1983 for a short stint before retrograding back to Libra and then re-entering in August 1984. 1984 was when Margaret Thatcher was in power and Reagan had just been elected for a second term.

A square describes a point in a planet’s cycle when it contends with the challenges that it has brought up. As much as Pluto in Aquarius is about Pluto being in the sign of Aquarius, it is also about Pluto contending with what it did when it was in Scorpio. Those were the days of deregulation. People were told that the public had to fend for itself through viral and drug related epidemics. Now, we have a bloated private sector and a dwindling public sector. Everytime there is some kind of crisis, it feels like the buck is passed to the common people.

One significant piece of Pluto in Aquarius is the algorithms that we are calling artificial intelligence. I don’t like to call these things artificial intelligence because I like to call things what they are and these things are not intelligent. These are algorithms and they might mimic writing, coding, and image formation but they aren’t intelligent on their own. The choice in name is important to me because it reminds me that people made these things the way they are—algorithms are built by other people who make decisions about how it can or can’t be used. They don’t possess intelligence on their own and they don’t make decisions on their own.

I feel like there is a lot of fear about these algorithms because they have the potential to exasperate issues that already exist. Sure, they might create new ones too but, mostly, they can exaggerate one huge already existing problem. What do I mean? I’m talking about how private industry is continually being bloated at the expense of the public good.

Back in 2008 when the banks were bailed out by the Federal Reserve, all of that money was actually meant to trickle down into the rest of the economy and into our lives. Did you know that? Maybe you didn't because it didn't happen. The banks used the money to speculate instead of loaning it out to struggling people.

The issue with algorithms doing cool things isn’t that they can do cool things better than human beings. That’s not the point. It doesn’t matter if an algorithm can make a painting better than a human because the point of art isn’t to make the best painting in the world. The issue around algorithms is that they are not owned and controlled by common people but by corporations. They’re not regulated by the people who the algorithm governs. The recruitment algorithms that decide who gets employed or not, whose resumes are read or not, are not designed by people who are looking for work. We don’t get to vote on whether or not they exclude people based on racial bias or gender preference. They hide how they work even as they govern us.

How cool would it be if an algorithm that mimics the artificial intelligence in science fiction were owned by and controlled by common people? How cool would it be if we got to decide where we want algorithms and where we don’t? How cool would it be if technology was a thing that supported life instead of being a thing that robs life in an effort to save capitalism?

So, we’ll see what happens with Pluto in Aquarius. In many ways, the deregulation era of Pluto in Scorpio was a way of contending with what happened during the atomic age when Pluto last transited Leo. I have a feeling that we won’t solve the problems we have, that we might create some new ones, that some problems might just go away, and also that a lot of us will learn new ways of surviving the world around us. Pluto in Aquarius won’t solve the problems of yesterday or of today. We don’t need it to. We just need to keep living. We are human beings who don’t exist to solve problems like machines but can only figure out how to live another day as the imperfect people we are.