Uranus-Neptune Trends

Uranus-Neptune Trends

Those Uranus-Neptune devices, cell phones, are reshaping our world. A new book, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, demonstrates how this technology has the potential to shape culture.

Uranus’ association with the 11^th house and Neptune’s association with the 12^th house suggest an intimacy of distant acquaintance or, as this book would have it, the disembodied closeness (another good Uranus-Neptune catchphrase) of intimate strangers. In other words, the cellular camera phone.

I was at Disneyland a few months ago. When a costumed Disney character—I think it was Goofy—walked out, he was instantly surrounded by children, several of whom excitedly held their camera phones aloft over the heads of the swarming kids (and some adults), waving them as they snapped pictures. Perhaps because I was in Fantasyland, I thought of magic wands being waved over a crowd. The cellular camera phone is the 21^st Century’s magic Uranus-Neptune wand.

Virtual World Alchemy

The virtual and real worlds continue to merge. Bots are virtual robots (hence the nickname, bots) used to perform online tasks. Recently, an exchange student in Japan was arrested for using bots to mug virtual players (read the news story) in an online game called Lineage II. He stole items from the players which he then sold for actual, real cash. Apparently, making real-world money from purloined virtual world gamers’ trinkets is becoming more and more common (read the BBC news story which first reported this phenomenon). This perfectly symbolizes the underworld of the Uranus-Neptune mutual exchange (with Uranus in Pisces and Neptune in Aquarius): criminal robots are employed in a technological universe to alchemically transmute digital lead into gold.

A Connected World

Two recent events brought the combined energies of Uranus and Neptune into sharp focus. The camera phone is making photo journalists out of ordinary citizens. Shortly after the 7/7 London bomb attacks, pictures began to appear on the Internet—camera phone pictures shot by individuals who were actually there at the scene. These pictures suddenly connected me, sitting in Southern California, with a place where I used to live in the mid-1960’s not far from the bombed Edgeware Station. There were no journalists framing the story for me, just people’s pictures—hundreds of them posted in an online photo community for the world to share.

Another example: Cancer listserv groups link people with others who are dealing with similar forms of cancer. Before the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993 and mostly before Neptune entered Aquarius in 1998, individuals diagnosed with rare forms of cancer were really alone. Now there are whole communities of people with rare forms of cancer who communicate and share treatments and hope with one another. Not to wax too New Agey, but there’s a lot to be said for the shared energies of Uranus and Neptune.