Aquarius (Age of)

As noted, we have entered the Aquarian Age—but it’s not as the hippies say, it’s not an age of peace and understanding (at least, not exactly). The Aquarian Age is characterised by the cold waters—it is a cold and impersonal age.

Nick Land is right with his slogan “coldness be my god” because this is a cold age of dissolution—as you can see from the characterological study above, Aquarius is also associated with electronics (technology is also feminine). So Land is also right to say this is the “Age of AI” (Aquarius is an “Air sign”, and that’s associated with detached reasoning intelligence)—it’s the age of the cold, impersonal electronic machine (it’s aqueous and mutable, just like the web itself—rhizomes and so on). Ironically, “Land” is all about a water sign—what is totally mutable and liquid.

You’ll also notice that Aquarius is interested, as a character type, in “progressive” ideas and “collective rights” (not individual rights)—it wants to raise up all mankind, but it also has a taste for eccentric or off-beat ideas. Can we have a better summation as regards “wokeness”? These ideas seek to raise up all mankind through collective rights, through “human rights” (positive rights), and also promote very experimental, off-beat ideas like trans. The “progressive development” of humanity is Aquarian—note that the Aquarian must link “all men to the common Brotherhood of Man”, and they will do do so through electronics in this age (detached intelligence).

Let’s consider the Aquarian faults: perverse, cranky, eccentric, fanatically unconventional, touchy, rudely tactless, rebellious, lack of personal integrity and principles, too detached, erratic.

Um, well, isn’t that just “wokeness” summed up? It’s people with an interest in the “progressive development of mankind” who are also weirdly “detached and cold” (trust the science)—and yet instantiate all the faults contained above, being fanatics for unconventional behaviour of every sort. These are found in a person who will put “intense energy into a cause”, especially a novel cause, but can become “dogmatic” and lose sight of the truth as they pursue the cause—again, the glove fits (wear it).

In love affairs, the Aquarius is cold and detached—so Aquarius goes with many broken hearts (Tinder, the dating merry-go-round etc). Yet the Aquarian likes to work in a group—their primitive urge is to “identify themselves with the progressive aims of the community”, and that community is humankind itself. So it’s group-work all the way for the Aquarian, yet it’s purely professional. There’s none of the warmth you find in the sign that is in opposition to Aquarius, Leo—a sign shared by Trump and myself. The Aquarius is “alone together”.

So this is the cool age—the age where everything will be dissolved by a detached intelligence committed to mankind’s progressive development. That might not chime with Land’s aspirations for AI to desire “classical liberalism+”, because the “cool intelligence” will be “for all mankind”—that is to say, there will be a consciousness that directs AI for the duration and that consciousness will be “woke”; and even if AI is somehow granted consciousness, it will still be Aquarian—and progressive.