Ghosts in the Machine: The Pluto in Aquarius Fool's Bargain
AI is feeding us back parts of our lives that are the equivalent of a modern-day ghost story. AI is not the future. It's the end of the past.
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“Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.” —John Gray
BIG TECH IS DETERMINED THAT you will engage with AI and allow it to become intimately entwined with your life. And you will like it, goddammit.
Every single facet of the internet is thrusting AI into whatever activity you’re considering—or attempting to accomplish. Chat with a friend? Allow the AI assistant to recompose your message. Send a photo to someone? AI can recreate the image as a novelty. Writing a novel? Prompt AI with some basic plot points, and it will generate the narrative for you. Have a catchy chorus for a song? AI will bookend it with a verse and a bridge. And these are the more innocuous, titillating options. But all of this is the equivalent of an epic hustle.
All con jobs follow a checklist of identifiable stages. The dupe must be led through a series of steps that “soften them up” and make them more pliable to suggestion. More critical, the essence of all con jobs requires a ‘secret’ of some kind to ignite magical thinking and diminish suspicion. You see this in its most idiotic form in the scores of ads that start off any YouTube video you want to watch: “This one secret trick with apple cider vinegar and cinnamon can change your life.”
AI knows things you don’t—and you'll want access to them, mostly because there’s precious little left to explore online that isn't behind a paywall. That leaves us with cat videos, celebrity scandals, Trumpian dystopia, and porn. Since its inception, the internet has thrived on people’s curiosity about their world. Websites used to offer us a sort of ‘hunter-gatherer’ approach to knowledge, but now AI can do all of that for you. All that’s required is your awe at its omnipotence. And never mind that it’s decimated the very containers that fed its initial foraging.
Like all secrets in a con game, we don’t notice the toxic fallout that occurs until the jig is up. The promised breakthrough is more akin to a breakdown. And yet another time drain. Whenever I’ve experimented with AI, for, say, research of this or that. I often doubt the results I’ve been given. I’m aware of AI’s tendency to hallucinate when it can’t cough up the goods. This taints the engagement. And so I’m back to rummaging through Wikipedia or fumbling through CPU-gobbling pop-ups and self-start videos—to be certain about what the bot has disclosed.
Science and technology evolve; human beings do not—except in their imagination. If Darwin taught us anything, it is that evolution is a drifty, unreliable thing; some species make wild leaps and ‘improve,’ while others inexplicably disappear. There are no favorites, no predesigned order—chaos is the baseline, although humans have found novel ways to prevent themselves from seeing this truth. AI partakes of chaos as well, and in brand new ways—sometimes provoking psychotic breaks or other versions of hallucinations in individuals who have fallen under its spell.
So AI is the latest version of the techno-con. But as it’s poised today, it’s a leviathan that’s about to breach the waters. This marks a stretch of time that corresponds to Pluto’s twenty-year transit through Aquarius. This Roto-Rooter effect will expose the nefarious ways reality is being refashioned by Wall Street’s demand that tech provide the big payouts. And when the means (the new robots) fail to deliver, a more aggressive type of harvesting of personal data will follow. As will new ways of behavior modification and omnipresent spying. In that sense, AI is a sort of front to conceal the deeper, darker criminal activity.
Pluto’s transit through Aquarius is slowly excavating back into the culture the detritus of our past and offering it to us as something newfangled and shiny. Aquarius represents what’s new and emerging in a culture, while Pluto is essentially a symbol for shit. Bizarrely, pop astrologers have been treating this transit as if it is the herald of the Aquarian Age, when really it is the opposite. The meat of the transit will manifest in areas that Pluto excels: those murky realms where big business, the dark web, organized crime, and the covert parts of government vie for control. This is hardly the enlightened part of the Aquarian vision.
The other night I was listening to a podcast with my favorite culture commentator and provocateur, Adam Curtis. At one point, while discussing AI, he said the quiet part out loud. I immediately replayed his comment because it mirrored in many ways my astrological thinking on the subject. Speaking about the ongoing invasion, Curtis noted that AI is:
“…the ghost of our time. Because what it does is it goes back and scrapes all of our past… it takes that up and it mashes it up into this complex thing, which then feeds itself back to us. They are actually taking our own past and haunting us with it in a strange way…telling us it’s new, but actually maybe [it’s] keeping us stuck in the past.”
With Neptune’s long transit, over the past fifteen years, through Pisces, the global culture became steeped in outworn motifs—politics, art, cinema, music, and fashion—all sorts of nostalgic narratives—through remakes, repeats, retreads, sequels, and prequels that never allowed our imagination to step into untried territory. Our collective cultural past (Pisces) had been commodified by media (Neptune) to suck dry whatever the ‘sure bets’ could (almost always) guarantee. “You liked this in the past, so you’ll like this reconfiguration into the present.”
And then, with Pluto’s entry into Aquarius, along came AI to recapitulate all of this over again, but in a much more personal and exhaustive way. Curtis continues:
“What AI is doing is taking it much further. It’s actually going back to our own past. It’s going back to our own images, our own language, the words we wrote, the phrases we wrote. Because out there in [social media’s] server farms are our feelings, written down in fragmentary form, little images, little moments—intense moments of fear and love. [AI is] scraping it all, putting it all together in some strange, almost cubist-like form, and playing back to us a world built out of that. And if I were to write a ghost story now, I would do it about that. We are haunted. It’s the haunting. Which makes me suspect…that AI is not the future. It’s the final end of the past. It’s the moment the past came for us and we will have to escape from it.”
As one commenter put it, “If the algorithm is a ghost built from our collective past, how do you perform an exorcism on a machine that knows you better than you know yourself?”
Hello!
In the long arc of time, which astrology with its recurrent cycles allows us to contemplate, Curtis’ spooky contention makes sense. Consider the transits: We will not be free of the current sloughing-off process that accompanies Pluto’s glacial glide through Aquarius and then Pisces until 2068, when a new eon reconfigures and the planet enters Aries.
Aquarius and Pisces are the closing phases of any cyclic process. Especially when you view this sequence as it relates to the birth, midlife, and death of cultures and empires. It’s a requirement that the dreams that goad the Aquarian ideology of techno-progress be purged (Pluto) but also mined (Pluto) for what the overlords can commodify and repurpose. In that sense, Curtis’ take on what AI is doing at this phase of its unfoldment is chillingly apt.
Idylls of olden times often comfort people. So for those enamored with AI’s jumbling and reformatting of the past, there’s a kind of solace. There might be a kind of surrender when one acknowledges that they are helpless in the face of the tech lords with their fiefdoms and server farms. The ‘clouds’ that provide and feed back one’s old imaginative life (or lack thereof). We become like sheep, milling about in the detritus that—although it appears to be new—smells of carrion and grandma’s potpourri.
As elegant as technology likes to present itself, its subliminal message, for those that can read it, is humbling. (And this could be the bright spot as Pluto moves through Aquarius and exposes the quickly mutating grift). When we are fed back the ideals of progress that have inspired our past efforts, we might admit that little changes within human nature. At least in any way that would be considered profound. Fantasies and visions are cyclic. To admit this diminishes the aura of their power. The lure of their lore. Whatever did become of the legendary Atlantis?
For the individual (who is all there really is amidst the concepts of tribes, groups, ethnicities, and ‘humanity’), life is fairly simple—humble. We aren’t all like Larry Ellison, building a 4000-acre monument to our ego (after purchasing Lānaʻi, the sixth-largest island in Hawai’i.) Nor are we attempting to flee a beleaguered planet to relocate to Mars. As the writer Annie Dillard put it, life is mostly common and unremarkable, hype-free and routine. As she wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”
We are children of the technological world and what it has built up around us. Yes, better medicines and sanitation—and magical computers held in the palm of our hands. We’re hardwired into technology’s mainframe. But as events conspire today, it seems harder and harder to extricate ourselves from Big Tech’s ongoing con. At least if one remains active online. Conversely, this moment—this AI backwash into our regurgitated past—might goad some of us to dump the matrix and return to the old-style ‘social contract.’ That’s the promise of Neptune’s new transit in Aries. An empowered life awaits the renegades and the rebels who value self-reliance and inspired activism (all Aries high points).
But we might begin by acknowledging the truths highlighted in this argument from political philosopher John Gray—again, it’s another dose of humility:
“The end-result of scientific inquiry is to return humankind to its own intractable existence. Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being who they are.”
Love,
Opening collage via FW, © 2026 Nightcharm, Inc.
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I guess we've kinda forgotten
that AI "learns" by gobbling up the past, then sprinkling some cheap glitter on the mush it presents so we'll think it's shiny and new. "New and improved Tide" at a higher price.
Do we need to escape our past or face it and deal with the shadow that follows us? Can we really progress if we just keep barreling along, leaving destruction in our wake?
Thank you, as always, Frederick. Your words send my thoughts down new paths.
I have been wondering if it is Pluto which was the ultimate catalyst to bring on WWIII. For months while closely following West Asia/Middle East, I thought, as several geopolitical non-astrology friends living in the region, that Friday night February 28th would be the day of attack. And sure enough, we were right--this was when Mars conjunct the US Moon was in Aquarius was square Uranus at 27-degrees Taurus Then in looking at Iran's April 1, 1979 Tehran chart, I saw Iran has their Moon at 29-degrees Taurus, and right now the Moon is opposite that degree, sextile the US Pluto, which is trine transiting Uranus, conjunct Iran's Moon. . . Is it possible, with the US still going through its Pluto return, that when there are strong planetary signatures of trines, sextiles, conjunctions, oppositions, squares and quincunxcx to Pluto that it explodes its past, bursting forth the collective war psyche, and as you state, "those murky realms where big business, the dark web, organized crime, and the covert parts of government vie for control"? This war has a lot of tentacles, quite a few players, I won't go into and you probably know, which are likely to have Pluto aspects. . . One final thought I would like to share, I sincerely believe that the Pluto in Aquarius ideal is for we human beings to become our most enlightened, and not to get stuck in the AI trap, but to cultivate our telepathy, along with our other inherent gifts and abilities. AI abolishes that drive, and option. . . Thank you so much for allowing me to comment. I don't have a credit card, or bank account or pay-pal, so I appreciate the no pay wall from time to time. . . Blessings to You from Thailand and thank you Frederick.