Just the Tip: Pluto Moves One Degree Into Aquarius and the Shit Hits the Fan
As media collapses, more people turn to TikTok influencers for the news. What could possibly go wrong?
“I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY”
As 2024 jumped from the starting gate news publications (and their websites and networks) are self-destructing globally. This article’s headline summed it up succinctly: The Media Is Melting Down, and Neither Billionaires Nor Journalists Can Seem to Stop It.
Welcome to The Destroyer’s new home in Aquarius, a sign I associate with the nervous system that links together (and informs) the constituents that comprise a group, tribe, or nation.
Aquarius, an ‘all over the place’ or universal air sign, ‘oversees’ the circulation of input and output within any organized system. Put in human terms, the data mainframe connects individuals and keeps them informed with (hopefully) objective reality checks.
Astrologically, the signs associated with the creator (Leo) and the community (Aquarius) are inseparable. Like all Zodiac polarities, one begets the other, and both are tethered.
Leo represents the aspirations of the creator—be she an artist, a writer, or whatever. This lone person translates their subjective impressions into objective productions that are, hopefully, experienced beyond the confines of her studio or office.
Aquarius is the outside grid where a creator’s work enters and exists. This involves a collective of people coming together to help show or publish the creator’s work. Like, say, in an art gallery with a staff that maintains a space for the artist’s work to be experienced.
Or like a newspaper or media platform where others can read and digest what the journalist has compiled for public consideration/consumption.
Because a healthy democracy depends on factual news distribution to keep the citizenry informed of what their government is doing, the continuing flameout of media—both ‘legacy’ and independent—is ominous.
Before the internet invasion, it’s amazing to consider how much newspapers depended on the thousands of classified ads that comprised their back pages. This perfectly symbolized the newspaper’s or magazine’s relationship with the individuals who read and sustained it.
Those classified ads, of course, were the first casualties of the nascent internet age. It was downhill from there for how hardcopy (and then online) publications maintained their ad-dependent business models. Then came the arrival of social media, which heightened the diminishing ad dollars even more.
Before social networks, media outlets had figured out tactics to fend off Google’s hegemony of the online ad market. But that was to be a short-lived remedy, as websites dinosaured-out and people scattered away into isolated social media watering holes. You can see the crippled vestiges of the old business models when you visit news sites today, especially if you’re viewing them on your phone.
I can no longer read most landing pages due to the 50 or 60 sentences that comprise the article buried within unasked-for-videos that display (and then reappear as soon as I shut them off) and the dozens of ads that appear to have been created in a Barnum and Bailey-equivalent ad agency.
More insidious than the loss of revenue were the echo chambers that social media created, where people divided into fierce factions that exacerbated the festering red and blue divide.
Information or data could not penetrate the bubbles, and this sort of sequestering allowed a candidate like Donald Trump to ascend and claim the collective’s imagination.
Two awful things followed.