The Fall of the Micro-Celebrity?
The Fall of the Micro-Celebrity?
Aquarius, AI and the Question of Soul
In late July, the Moon’s Nodes shifted onto the Aquarius-Leo axis, with the North Node in Aquarius and the South Node in Leo, and they remain there until late March 2028.
I don’t know about you, but I’m already sensing a shift in the atmosphere — socially, culturally, and particularly in the online environment. So I want to explore a hypothesis about what might be emerging during this nodal cycle.
I don’t see astrology in a simple cause-and-effect way. I’m much more interested in synchronicity — those extraordinary moments when what is happening in the heavens seems somehow to correspond with what is emerging through human consciousness and culture.
The Head and Tail of the Dragon
Before going any further, it’s probably worth saying something about how I understand the Nodes themselves.
They always lie opposite one another, and traditionally they were described as the head and tail of a great celestial dragon.
The South Node carries a kind of psychic momentum from the past. It describes patterns and responses that have become deeply familiar — and in many ways it is a gift we carry in our karmic story, but perhaps a gift we have held onto too tightly.
The North Node points towards something asking to become more conscious: a quality that needs our attention because we have become overly reliant on the familiar territory of the South Node.
So this isn’t South Node bad, North Node good. We don’t simply abandon one and rush towards the other. We tend to move back and forth between them.
The deeper work is to become conscious of the whole axis: what has become overdeveloped or automatic, and what is trying to emerge.
So with Aquarius now on the North Node and Leo on the South Node, the question is: what have we become overly identified with in the Leonine? What are we beginning to see through in the shadows of that identification, and what might be drawing us towards an opposite, yet somehow complementary, Aquarian perspective?
When the Network Was Born into Mass Consciousness
This isn’t the first time we’ve been here, of course.
The last time we had the North Node in Aquarius and the South Node in Leo was from December 2007 through to August 2009.
Facebook exploded during this period, passing 100 million active users in August 2008 and reaching around 250 million by the summer of 2009. At the same time, the smartphone revolution was gathering pace.
Suddenly the network wasn’t simply somewhere you went when you sat down at a computer. No — you started carrying it around with you: into the street, into the café, into the bedroom, into your friendships and relationships.
It changed society.
And when I look back at that period, I’d say we were witnessing something very Aquarian: the network itself being born into mass consciousness.
Leo Takes Centre Stage
Then something very interesting happens nine years later, when the Nodes reverse.
From May 2017 until November 2018 we have the North Node in Leo and the South Node in Aquarius — they’re the other way round.
And what do we see then?
We see the massive expansion of Instagram: from around 700 million monthly users in April 2017 to a billion by June 2018.
And alongside that we see the increasing cultural importance of the influencer, personal branding, and what academics were already describing in terms of self-branding and “micro-celebrity” — the transformation of the ordinary individual into a public persona whose visibility itself becomes a form of currency.
That’s really interesting.
Because if Aquarius gives us the network, then Leo gives us the individual standing in the centre of that network saying: Here I am. Look at me. I’ve got something important to say.
Now, Leo is very easy to caricature, and I don’t want to do that. We need Leo. We need heart, creativity, courage, individual expression, life force — the willingness to stand up and say: this is what I see; this is what I have made; this is my gift to the world.
And there was something genuinely liberating about the promise of social media. You didn’t necessarily need a publisher, a record company or a broadcaster. Ordinary folk could speak directly to other ordinary folk.
That was extraordinary.
But inevitably, perhaps, the ego of the newly empowered Instagram micro-celebrity could become inflated.
Visibility itself began to acquire value.
How many followers have you got? How many people liked that? How many people shared it? How much engagement did you get?
To the point of obsession.
And increasingly we find ourselves living within an economy of attention in which being visible can become conflated with being valuable.
The network became a stage.
Are We Approaching the End of the Micro-Celebrity Era?
And so here we are now, and the Nodes have reversed again.
Aquarius is back on the North Node. Leo is back on the South Node.
And I find myself wondering: could we be approaching the end of the micro-celebrity era?
Obviously not the end of people becoming well known, nor the end of individual self-aggrandisement. But perhaps the beginning of the end of a particular assumption: that the person with the biggest audience must therefore be the person with the most valuable thing to say.
I mean, it’s an absurd idea if you think about it, and yet in our vanity as human beings we end up obsessing about it.
Well, perhaps the online environment is changing again.
The network is no longer merely social.
It’s become intelligent.
AI search is radically changing the way we find information. We can ask extraordinarily specific questions, and increasingly these systems can search across multiple lines of enquiry and surface material according to its relevance to what we are actually looking for.
So perhaps we are moving — at least partly — from an online culture based around popularity towards a culture of relevance.
Is what you have to say relevant to something I am actually seeking?
And I find that fascinating.
Imagine you are looking for a very particular teacher. Or therapist. Or astrologer. Or somebody who has spent thirty years quietly researching some obscure but beautiful subject.
Perhaps they’re hopeless at Instagram. Perhaps they have very few followers.
But they know something.
They’ve lived something.
They’ve developed a body of work.
And maybe now you’ll be able to find them not because everybody else already knows who they are, but because what they have to offer corresponds very precisely with something that you are looking for.
That could be enormously liberating.
It could, potentially, level the playing field a bit in ways we haven’t yet really begun to understand.
But Who Decides What Is Relevant?
Of course, it’s way more complicated than that.
Who decides what is relevant? Who teaches the machine what matters? What gets amplified — and what disappears?
Can an algorithm genuinely recognise wisdom?
Can it recognise something that has soul?
And this is the deeper question that troubles me.
Machines are becoming uncannily good at behaving like human beings. They can talk to us. They can write. They can make images. They can respond sympathetically. They can analyse enormous bodies of information and find connections within them with astonishing speed.
And at the same time, I would say, human beings are behaving more and more like machines.
We want to optimise ourselves. We measure our performance according to a whole range of metrics. We feel the pressure to constantly produce, to respond immediately to messages, to turn ourselves into data.
We even use machine language to describe our experiences.
“I need to recharge my batteries.”
“My brain’s got too many tabs open.”
We talk about patterns and behaviours being “hard-wired”. And in New Age language we talk about receiving “downloads” or getting an “upgrade”.
This is machine-talk.
And so where is the line?
We are not machines.
Why are we talking about ourselves as if we are?
Where Is the Life?
What is it that makes us human?
And with regard to AI, what is there in us that cannot be replicated, however sophisticated the simulation becomes?
For me, this is a question of the soul.
We could argue endlessly about what exactly the soul is. But perhaps we know what soul is experientially before we ever attempt to define it.
We know when something has life in it.
We know when somebody is truly present with us.
We know when we encounter something that has emerged out of lived experience — out of suffering perhaps, or love, or devotion, or years of patient attention.
And one of the great faculties of soul, I would say, is discernment.
The ability to recognise the difference. To sense what is real. What is really alive. What belongs to an animate world.
And to distinguish that from what is artificial, what is manufactured — however convincing the imitation might become.
Does that mean that everything made with technology is soulless?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Technology can, of course, be an instrument through which something deeply human is expressed. And human beings are perfectly capable of producing things that are mechanical, formulaic and deadened without using technology at all.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply:
Was this made by a person or by a machine?
Perhaps the deeper question is:
Where is the life?
What are we participating in here? What kind of relationship is being created? And what is happening to us through our participation in it?
Becoming More Deeply Human
Perhaps one of the main challenges during this Aquarius North Node period is how we preserve human values in an increasingly automated society.
But I would actually go further than that.
I think it is to become much more conscious of what being human actually means.
Because if machines increasingly outperform us at speed, processing, productivity and the reproduction of information, then our task can’t simply be to move even faster to try and keep up.
It has to be the question of how we become more deeply human.
More embodied, more relational, more discerning, more capable of genuine attention.
And that means slowing down, not speeding up.
Perhaps then we might be able to recognise soul — in ourselves, in one another, and in the living world around us.
And perhaps that is another way of thinking about this Aquarius-Leo axis.
We need the beating heart of Leo. We need Leo’s courage, creativity and generosity — the willingness to bring forward what is uniquely ours.
But perhaps the South Node in Leo is unravelling our obsession with being seen for it.
The look at me, look at me — aren’t I great?
Aquarius asks a different question.
How does what I carry participate in something larger?
How does it serve the network, the community, the human and the more-than-human field within which we collaborate?
How do we find one another without turning ourselves into commodities in order to be found?
I don’t know what will happen over these next eighteen months.
But when I place these three periods alongside one another — the rise of the social network in 2007 to 2009, the extraordinary flowering of the influencer and micro-celebrity culture around 2017 and 2018, and now this rapid emergence of an AI-mediated internet — I can’t help wondering whether something is shifting again.
Perhaps from visibility towards relevance.
Perhaps from the charismatic individual towards the network.
Perhaps from the performance of identity towards a more searching question about what is actually real.
And perhaps, paradoxically, the more convincing our machines become at imitating us, the more urgently we are called to remember what cannot be imitated.
The soul.
And the faculty of discernment through which, somehow, we recognise who we are — as living presence, in a world that is teeming with life, and which invites our active participation within it.