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I went to see the film Transformers recently and wrote a small blog on another site about it here. Afterwards, I spent some time thinking about the relationship between humanity and technology and found myself thinking down an old back alley of the mind. I remember when The Matrix came out in 1999. Particularly, the idea of physical ports in your body to connect to computerized devices. The film is a graphic, scary and yet cool depiction of a world in which humanity is, for all intents and purposes, cyborgs. At the time, it was a fun coffee shop question of mine to ask my peers if they would ever have a ‘port’ installed should the process come available and carry cool benefits. The buzz seemed to be split, with half having moral objections to the procedure and the other wide open to it – technophiles and technophobes. And, the buzz was not isolated to computer movie geeks such as myself, nor to the Wachowski Brothers, it seemed to have small reverberations throughout the film industry. Films such as Dark City, Thirteenth Floor and eXistenZ all came out at approximately the same time as though it were being ushered into the collective conscious, demanding us to answer: what is our relationship to technology now? At the same time, Kevin Warwick the self proclaimed ‘first cyborg’, appeared on the front cover of Wired magazine and caught my eye with the title: I Cyborg. Kevin is a professor of cybernetics in England and had a device surgically implanted under his skin that operated as a radio/antenna device. He later hoped to surgically implant another device to his nervous system that might allow him to transmit neural information over the internet. Wild times!

That was eight years ago. Of these aforementioned films, the only one that seems to stand out in the context of time is The Matrix. Since then technology continues to explode. Cell phones. Mp3 players. Bluetooth. And now, the re-issueing of Transformers… why? What does this say about our culturally perceived relationship to technology now (note: as I mentioned in my other blog on the subject of Transformers, I was quite startled by the dissociative portrait of humanity and technology)? And, of all things, how does this relate to astrology?

These questions came to light a couple of years ago when I stumbled upon a book at the downtown library by Andy Clark, a british professor of philosophy and cognitive science. Basically, according to Clark humanity has been cyborgs for a very long time. How could we have overlooked something like this you might ask? Well, Clark says that we need to examine our concept of ‘cyborg’. The term cyborg refers to a combination of organism and cybernetic, and as Clark claims, the relationship is symbiotic. Thus, a cyborg is any organism that depends upon a particular technology for its survival and vice a versa. A cyborg is not necessarily an organism that has been transgressed at the level of the flesh by technology! In other words, humans became cyborgs the moment that they fashioned tools and weapons to help them forage for or kill to obtain food (sustenance). As far as Clark is concerned, humanity has consistently worked since this time to further develop this relationship between ourselves and technology and will continue in this endeavour.

Okay, bringing this all back into the realm of astrology (and please read my section at the top of this page entitled ‘astrology for beginners’ if you feel lost by the following discussion)…

One might conceive of astrology, by way of the development of zodiac signs, houses and planets as a progression from the egotistical self to the other, where ‘other’ becomes increasingly ominous. As a matter of fact, the entire bottom half of the chart typically speaks to the development of ‘self’ and the top half of the chart speaks to the development of ‘self’ in relation to the ‘other’. Of course, we tend to conceive of the ‘other’ as either another person (as in the 7^th house) or as a collective, which we see as we move beyond the ninth house.

But…

Why do we need to limit our definition of ‘other’ in astrology to people, or rather other subjects? Could the ‘other’ also be defined as technology, where we speak of a particular device in the 7^th house and the technological phenomena as we move past the 9^th house?

A penny for your thoughts?