Uranus In Aries Overload, Virgo Overabundant, Balance In The Mix And The Boy With The Robohand

Enter The Cyber Warrior

In the future, athletes will have devices attached to them, tracking their every move on the field of play, where the data is compiled and funneled into the virtual cloud, which descends as digital downpours into mainframes, sifting, processing and formatting the data for a variety of purposes, some stated, others not. Well that future is right now. In a move that thoroughly embodies the spirit of Uranus in Aries, the NFL has employed what they call, “Next Gen Stats.” Essentially, every player has a Fitbit styled chip affixed to their gear and said chip tracks everything, from heart rate, to to how fast they run, to how far they run, to who know what else. That’s every player. They then compile the stats and spit them back out to the public, sometimes in game, sometimes later, after they’ve crunched the data. Uranus is technology and Aries is soldiers and athletes.

Wearable tech is nothing new. A watch, in it’s purest and simplest forms is wearable tech. Back in the nineties, I used to wear a watch that doubled as a real time ephemeris and gave me updates on own chart. But the degree that the tech can derive information from us, including our biological functions has exploded. In a country obsessed with stats, data and trivia, this kind of information is like crack for numbers geeks and it gets people used to the fact that tracking isn’t just normal but really cool and fun. It’s the slow boil.

Football isn’t alone. In the NBA, some players are tracked 24/7 where the teams can monitor their sleep patterns, diet, metabolism, etc., so that they can get a handle on their cycles, especially during training and find ways to maximize their performance.

The model for the modern super soldier, I mean athlete was developed in Eugene at Nike University, aka University of Oregon, flowing with Phil Knight’s donor dollars. It was there that Chip Kelly, the Ducks former coach availed himself of Knight’s money and explored conditioning and performance as a way to get a competitive edge for his athletes. Kelly’s success was legendary. He turned the timid Ducks into a national powerhouse and while they never won a national title, they were always in the hunt.

Kelly, a Sagittarius has taken what he learned at Eugene into the pros with the Eagles and while he’s been to the playoffs twice since his arrival, his roll as the head coach in Philly has been rocky.

While I applaud the desire to expand our physical abilities, the invasive nature of being monitored and tracked is being marketed to us as not only commonplace, but cool. At some point, there will be a drive and push to make live, real time monitoring and tracking mandatory for a health status. Everything and I mean everything is moving towards automation. Robots already field your calls and Google now wants to drive your car for you.

If you’re being medically tracked and your Glycemic levels spike, then you could get a text to cut back on refined sugars. If it continued, you’d have an appointment made to see a specialist for pre-diabetes. And while this sounds quite helpful, what happens if you don’t comply? What happens if you say, “I got this?” Virtual doc might not like that very much, because automation is supposed to lead to efficiency and if you’re pre-diabetic, then it’s not your health that’s really the issue, it’s the cost the system would incur by having to treat you and the complications of your condition. That’s what’s really at stake.

In Pluto in Capricorn, models of efficiency are launched into the collective like the sentinels from the Matrix. It’s not just football where we’re being conditioned to accept a more intimate relationship with technology and it’s ability to track and protect us.

In the recent, thirty-second-spot from IBM, their AI agent, Watson has a Q&A with a cute seven-year-old named “Anabelle.” He asks her questions about her upcoming birthday, ponies, and cake, then tells Anabelle that based on her current data with her doctor, that she is healthy. Anabelle even asks him if he is a doctor. By the way, what’s up with the teddy bears? Don’t these people watch Stanley Kubrick? Teddy = Peddy.

It all seems so innocuous and darling, but this is marketing, not marketing for now, but the the future. They’re laying the neural networks for the Anabelles of the world at 27, just like the NFL is doing the same with young males, getting them used to the fact that monitoring is cool. One model conforms to the notion of security and health, which in many regards is feminine, while the other promotes high performance and achievement, which is basically male. Now before I get a bunch of comments refuting what I just wrote or saying that these models are antiquated and part of the problem, you have to understand that this is advertising and they use base line modalities to reach into the psyche. This is still a Bernaysian world of sub-conscious influence.

Watson made another noteworthy appearance with Bob Dylan of all people recently, yes, the same Bob Dylan who has for all intents and purposes admitted that he did a deal with the devil on the now famous, “60 Minutes” interview with Ed Bradley. Apparently, Watson is getting into the healing game as well, evidenced by another thirty-second-spot where he’s being trained in MRI, image recognition. I’m not suggesting we return to saws and pliers as healing tools, but it does feel like we’re moving towards a point in the not–too–distant–future where our world will be driven by relentless models of efficiency in pursuit of some form of perfection, human, corporate or otherwise.

We’ve been under the influence of the stunning stellium of Virgo (Mars/Venus/Jupiter) with a lunar topper just a few short days ago. I’ve been incredibly busy on the reading front, but I’ve had time to ponder this whole notion of perfection, which is a constant and steady theme in Virgo. Models of efficiency are our often vain, yet somewhat quaint attempt to mirror God, while frantically keeping the chaos at bay. We dutifully train the Watson’s of the world, we’ll have our cars driven by Google, our media hand selected for us based on preference, our asses padded with climate controlled toilet seats, always in search of perfection and mastering the chaos of our environments. Meanwhile the world’s borders are bursting at the seams with chaos, stormed by the uncontrollable, brutish masses who worship alien gods, driven mad by ten-years-worth of constant bombing, shelling, and bullets in fill-in-the-blank-stan.

In cinema the relentless drive for order and a society built entirely on efficiency can be seen in Frtiz Lang’s occult-techno masterpiece, “Metropolis” where the world itself is split in two. The upper world is a precursor to the Third Reich’s noble society and a projection of Plato’s “Utopia.” But underneath the modern city, the sweat, toil and ceaseless labors of human endeavor and abject slavery keeps the world running on time. There’s an extreme bifurcation of class and culture.

In a more modern portrayal, “Elysium” starring Matt Damon is an iteration on the same theme, but with a heavy dose of the under class being much closer to home; Dystopian Los Angeles in the future, a place dominated by Latino, border culture that has finally crossed the imaginary boundaries of geographical demarcation. In “Elysium” they must go one step further, into space itself as the privileged class live like gods above the grimy atmosphere.

“Elysium” is also a case study in predictive programming, but we’re not going to go there just right now.

Suffice it to say, our endless pursuit of perfection from a corporate standpoint, where the machine is consistently more error free than it’s human counterparts creates a new series of imbalances, many of which cannot be seen from our limited perspective. When efficiency morphs into ruthless control, masquerading as progress and technological evolution, we will be slaves to the very systems we created to liberate us from the ultimate failure of being human and flawed.

But there is hope!

I recently ran across a story about a nine-year-old boy named “Matthew Shields” who had a hand with a thumb and not much else. He was being derided by his classmates and a sixteen-year-old friend of the family (Pluto in Sag) heard about it, stepped in and did something. He went to the local library in Overland Park, Kansas where they have a 3D printer. He uploaded a program called “Robohand” and created a prosthetic hand for the boy. Now this is a pure example of Uranus in Aries, where technology (Uranus) is liberated for the use and empowerment of the individual (Aries). And, what’s beautiful about this from a cosmic perspective is that Libra, the opposite sign of Aries kicked in and restored balance to the situation, across the board. This is what’s needed, a balanced, heart-centered approach to technology, and one where the individual has direct access to it.

On The Friday FARcast, this past week, I was joined by fellow astrologer, Mark Metheny and we went down the rabbit hole exploring these tricky dynamics in these rapidly changing times. You can listen to it here, below.

In the meantime, Venus in Libra comes in to lighten things up, treat one another with kindness and balance. Let a little love and grace in.