every time i hear about an orangesite VC bro talking about co-star, or hear about the inherent properties of aquariuses, i wanna tear my fingers off
astrology is like the gender binary but with 6x as many labels and 6x as meaningless. and yet it's embraced by a good chunk of nonbinary people i know! (All of which are certainly classified as their birth sex by Co-Star btw.)
Everything bad I have to say about the gender binary, U have to say about the astrology 12-nary. Except, any formulation of gender you can give me likely provides information-theoretically useful information about aspects of a person!
Whereas astrology? Despite signs having little-to-no predictive power, they're very information theoretically useful for stalking. I'd like to describe astrology from that sense.
TLDR: Astrological signs are some very-conveniently formatted, high-information data that can be used for stalking. I'd recommend not sharing your astrological information if personal safety is important to you.
Example one: It's plausible to derive SSN from astrological signs.
It's even worse if you're in the US, because your social security number and your sun/moon/rising signs determine one another.
Seriously: In the US, SSNs are not a random number (unless born after 2011). The first three digits are assigned to location (rising sign), the next two are the group number (rising sign again), and the last four are the serial number. These were assigned serially (i.e. it is common for twins/triplets/etc to have SSNs with the same 8 digits.) Gathering enough data would be enough to "pigeonhole" to get the serial number (modulo some assumptions about age, timezone, etc.)
But using your signs to get your SSN is kind of a roundabout thing, and getting your last 4 digits would require more people participating in astrology. (If ~10% of a group has publicized their astrological data, then you can bin everyone in that group among ~1000 different serial numbers. If ~99% of a group participates in astrology, then you can bin everyone in that group among 100 different serial numbers.)
Your signs (plus other inferred information like active timezone and language) are very useful alone to personally identify you!
Example two: In the real world, astrological signs are very useful for stalking.
This isn't a "what if" btw. During 2020, at behalf of my partner's friend who started doing online sex work, I did my best to try to go "backwards", i.e. find her IRL accounts from her OnlyFans. I had the benefit of inside knowledge, but (1) her astrological signs alone immediately allowed me to find her Twitter, and from there (2) her phone case made it obvious to any stalker that this was the same person.
I was in this situation two more times, at behalf of the target. In one of those times, astrological signs of their immediate friends allowed me to link a FetLife to a Facebook. (Earliest friends on social media are probably someone who introduced them to the site. Fetlife -> Earliest friends -> Astrological sign of a friend -> Twitter of a friend -> Twitter links to Instagram -> Earliest friends / tagged / earliest posts and posts -> Recognize target -> Targets personal instagram profile -> Name and other biographical information, Facebook, etc.)
In two of these three cases, astrological signs were tantamount to linking someones identities. It might have been possible without participation in astrology, but it sure made it really easy!
This might have been feasible without astrological signs if I had a large technological infrastructure built to scrape sites, detect phone cases and faces and engineer features to use as a key, utilize proper fuzzy graph isomorphism. But instead, all it took were a few minutes of Google searches.
I feel like the "the astrology industry is manipulating you" and the "read about manufactured consent" approach and the "astrology is pretty much the same as gender" approach doesn't really resonate with anyone. So I hope this post was sufficiently creepy! I'm refining the "astrology is harmful and here's how individuals can use it to enact harm to you and your friends, with real-world examples, also its much worse with even a little bit of technological effort" approach.
musou wrote
i am the token anti-astrology person in my queer friend circles. i have the benefit of being a pretty good counterexample. i went to school with a person who was born 6 minutes after me, in neighboring rooms of the same wing of the same hospital. our star charts are basically identical, but our personalities, goals, temperaments, etc are nothing alike. growing up, this was just a fun coincidence our parents would joke about at school functions, but once i encountered people who genuinely did believe that a person's star charts have a predictive quality, it became really useful information.
but regardless of whether astrology is real or not, i think belief in it can do real harm, in the same way that many unjustified beliefs can. i grew up in an oppressive evangelical conservative christian environment, so i have a lot of nuanced and complex feelings about this kind of magical thinking, which is endemic to that environment albeit in a different form. several people i know who escaped from those same circles ended up getting into astrology, tarot, and other supposed forms of divination, and i have observed a lot of the same unhealthy behaviors around them as were present in the people i knew in the church, as well as people who are into this stuff who were never in the church. in the church, i saw people break off promising, healthy relationships because they didn't want to be "unequally yoked" (the religious jargon term in these circles for being in a relationship with someone who does not share your belief system) and end up lonely and hurting for years as a result. similarly i've seen my astrology friends break off relationships due to supposedly incompatible star signs, to the same effect. i've seen people be pressured by church leaders into making drastic life decisions, often abandoning talents, hobbies, or life goals because "nothing should be more important to you than god", and i've seen people make similarly drastic life-altering decisions on the basis of a palm reading, a tarot spread, or a dire horoscope.
i think the best argument for this kind of thing, and a defense i've heard raised by many people who do engage with these beliefs and practices (including my own partner), is that it can act as a kind of sounding board to help amplify and untangle one's own thoughts and feelings on a subject. this is something i can sympathize with to a degree. i am the kind of person who is easily paralyzed when i have to make a choice among several competing options. for a while, i used to carry a die with me so i could break through these feelings of indecision by just picking a choice at random. however, as i used this method, i noticed that there were times where i would roll the die, and then be unhappy at the result - a sign that i really did have an opinion, but one that i wasn't able to understand or acknowledge until i saw the die select a different option for me. if someone is engaging with astrology or other forms of magical thinking on this level - as a tool for greater self-knowledge, in which the real lived experience of the self overrides any notions of supposed authority of the unjustified belief - then i think it can be useful. the problem is in the way that the concept of "spiritual authority" is used to control human behavior - that absolutely does real harm, regardless of if the authority in question is a church elder, an astrologer, a cartomancer, a book, etc.