Flowing into the Age of Air
Or: how to prepare for the next 200 years
Change is in the air--both symbolically and literally. As of December 12th 2020, we have officially been subsumed within the epochal period known as the age of air. We are accelerating towards escape velocity, barely four years into a two century-long ride, leaving behind the old age of earth.
Elemental ages are defined by the great conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn which occur once every 20 years. By happy astronomical coincidence, they meet in signs of the same element, over and over, with one or two transitional periods where they meet in elements of the previous or next elemental age. Like seasons, the ages blend into one another.
Leaving behind the age of earth
Each age is defined by a fixation on matters related to the esoteric element of that age. Earth ages are marked by earthy things. The tangible, advances in fundamental physics, the very material world itself and the rise of materialism. Capitalism, industry, production, mounds and hoards of wealth like dragons in caves. Wars over territory and resources, both on top of and within the earth.
For the past 178 years, we have been in an age of earth, which began when Jupiter and Saturn met in Capricorn on January 25th, 1842. Since then they have met in the earth signs sequentially--Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn until their conjunction in Aquarius in 2020. In the United States, the 1840s saw the expansionist Mexican-American war and manifest destiny, the first 3,000 miles of railroad track, the coinage of the term "dinosaur" by Richard Owen, the emergence of scientific geology and the quest to determine the age of the earth, and the explosion of the industrial revolution.
Up through to 2000 we saw the roll out of telecoms that connected people across the vastness of the earth, making it smaller: the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and the first computer networks. We built our society overwhelmingly on oil and gas, building transit networks and shipping logistics across state lines under a singular federal government and consolidated massive wealth and power. We pulled so much out of the earth that now we can order almost anything we want from a megabillionaire's website and have it arrive within a day.
As my brilliant friend Hawk points out, each elemental age seems to "generate an idea in their final moments that encapsulate the element and lay the groundwork for the next". They noted that the friction match was invented in 1826 and the safety match in 1844, during the end of the previous age of fire (~1603 - ~1842). This symbolized the the technological mastery of fire and combustion: we went from the blast furnace, to the consumer stove, to an object so ubiquitous that anyone can carry one in their pocket to start a fire. Similarly, the elapsing age of earth has seen the compression of the earth through logistics, telecoms, and computing. People can now reach virtually anyone, anywhere, using small devices made of earth metals and electricity which they carry around in their pockets.
Each elemental age seems to generate an idea in their final moments that encapsulate the element and lay the groundwork for the next.
What winds blow this way in the age of air? To understand the nature of what's coming, we have to consider the nature of the air element. Air is fluid and ever-shifting, swirling, swift, and ephemeral and ungraspable. As the medium which facilitates sound via vibration, carrying the voice, air is associated with communication and the transfer of information. We are already seeing the beginnings of this: AI language models which can speak in real-time conversations with us, the normalization of drone warfare and livestreamed conflict, severe climate change due to atmospheric pollution, massive expansion of cell networks, the ubiquitousness and increasing multiplicity of social media and group chat apps, and a wave of interest in networked thinking and personal knowledge management software.
We actually had a small preview into what this era is about during the transitory air period at the tail end of the age of earth, from December 1980 to May 2000. During this time we saw the birth of ARPANET, an early prototype of the internet developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency under the US Department of Defense. This academic experiment quickly expanded into a sprawling distributed communications network with which anyone with a computer and a dial up connection could access to share their thoughts and ideas on personal websites or shared BBSes, forums, and chat rooms. We had the first twinkles of distributed computing, wireless systems, mobile devices, email, neural networks, and robotics. The internet was wild, personal, sometimes dangerous, but mostly free.
Then came the final age of earth period from May 2000 to December 2020. During this time, earth resumed control and devoured the innovations of the transitory air period. It turned distributed computing towards monolithic companies running fleets of servers, massive "cloud computing" data centers with armed guards for three companies; individual publishing and personal sites were subsumed by the homogenous vortexes of social media and various proprietary chat apps; and the Patriot act debilitated personal privacy and internet usage rights at the behest of government control and surveillance. It was a period of hypercommodification of anything and everything, aided by technology.
But the age of earth is over now, and it's not coming back within our lifetimes. The cracks are beginning to show in political unrest and deep cultural fault lines. The future of the country is uncertain, and anyone who thinks otherwise certainly isn’t an astrologer.
Revolutionary events in the United States
Each person, animal, blade of grass, and thought has its own natal chart, if we know the time and place of its origin. So do countries, and the United States has one very frequently used chart, the Sibly chart (after the astrologer Ebenezer Sibly) which marks the time at which the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The United States is defined by conflict. It was formed in the midst of the Revolutionary War, when Mars (the planet of war) and Uranus (freedom and rebellion) were in Gemini, the sign signifying multiple (often two) things and the tension and multiplicity between them. The many planets in Cancer ruled by the Moon in the collective-minded Aquarius suggests a "for the people" ethos, but power-hungry and grasping Pluto's opposition from material, tangible, ambitious Capricorn suggests a nation constantly in tension with its relationship to power, control, and domination in pursuit of stability and resources.
While there are many long-term cycles to examine, to me Uranus and Pluto together seem to indicate the nature of significant, revelatory conflicts in US history. In the Sibly chart—stamped during the Revolutionary War—Pluto was in the second house of money and resources, in opposition to the 8th house Cancer placements of debts, taxes, and entanglement with other nations’ resources. The explicit reason for the Revolutionary War was "taxation without representation", in response to Great Britain imposing taxes on American colonists without giving them colonial representation in Parliament. Pluto in Capricorn is also ruled by exalted Saturn in Libra in the eleventh house, which mundane astrologer H.S. Green and others associated with representative legislative bodies like Parliament. The seventh house is the house of foreign affairs, including war. Uranus and Mars there say: we'll fight for our freedom if we have to!
During the Civil War in 1861 when Uranus was in Gemini, Pluto was in Taurus, the whole sign sixth house of the Sibly chart. In contemporary mundane astrology we ascribe the sixth house to workers, employees, and public health, but traditional sources also ascribe the sixth to slaves. The Civil War, of course, was about the Confederacy's secession from the union out of the fear they wouldn't be allowed to own human beings anymore under Lincoln. 84 or so years later, the United States enters World War II in direct response to an attack on US soil during Pearl Harbor—again while Uranus is in Gemini—but this time with Pluto in Leo in the ninth house, which signifies international matters, shipping and sea traffic, and religion. The US involved itself in response to an attack on Pearl Harbor, to fight a consolidated enemy whose most notable cause was religious and ethnic genocide, and went on to establish major international coalitions such as NATO and the UN. There was also the first World War when Uranus was in Aquarius (in the Sibly chart, the second quadrant house of resources/wealth and the third whole sign house of neighboring states) and Pluto was in Cancer in the 8th (foreign trade). The United States did not experience any attacks or involvement on US soil, but entered the war out of concerns of German submarines threatening US ships and trade routes.
Fast forward to the present, and Pluto has recently completed its return to its 27° Capricorn placement in the Sibly chart. Few things manage to survive the ~250 year cycle that Pluto makes, especially given that Pluto signifies overwhelming control, coercive power, and death itself--Hades. It's fitting that in the Sibly chart, Pluto sits in what ancient astrologers called the "Gate of Hades", or the second house. With claims of manipulated elections in either direction, the country sits on unsteady ground, as Pluto ingresses into Aquarius on November 20th of this year—in eight days—and Uranus comes barreling toward us in Gemini again in April of 2026. On top of that, on February 19th of 2026 Saturn and Neptune will ingress into 0° Aries simultaneously, a configuration we haven't seen since around 6,000 years ago. And, as if that weren't enough, on July 17th of the same year we have the "basket" formation of Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, described by André Barbault, the mundane astrologer who successfully predicted many world events including the COVID pandemic.
One doesn't need to look far in our fresh post-election climate to find evidence of turmoil that might shake the foundation of the country to its very roots—or perhaps to pieces. My personal hope is that Pluto in the third whole sign house of Aquarius (neighboring states), closely trining Uranus in Gemini, indicates a (relatively) conflict-free reorganization of US culture and resources along ideological lines. At this point, a way back to a united sense of national identity and common grounds on even the most foundational of ideals seems less and less likely. Conspiracy theories abound on both sides, people make unlikely and bizarre alliances, and our centralized educational institutions are falling apart, allowing gossip, misinformation, and "alt truths" to travel at the speed of sound.
Of course, in the age of air, where information flows, intermingles, and communicates as fast as hurricanes, this is perfectly in line and to be expected. The times, they are a-changin'. And we're changing with them.
Orienting toward the age of air
In the age of earth, materialism in the US rose en masse. We looked down to the ground beneath our feet for inspiration, mastering the physical sciences until we could split the atom and look beyond it into the space of quantum probabilities. Massive innovations in mathematics, science, technology, and general standards of living and medicine instilled a deep sense that maybe what's in the material is really all there is. Even the most influential of religions were relegated to church days, relatively sanitized acts of worship and relationship kept far apart from daily life and experience for most people. The big bang, and the fatalistic-deterministic extrapolation of the billiard balls of molecules exploding from the assumed first origin point, defined generations within this age: pragmatic, resource-focused, and frequently nihilistic.
In an age of air, we will look again to the sky. Interest will tend toward airy modes of thinking--the ephemeral, the ever-changing, the etheric, the abstract, the ideal. All modes of science and research will become more and more interdisciplinary in nature as the streams of thought tangle and interact with one another. The sense of what is real and true will no longer have a solid, evenly distributed, centralized foundation: instead, education and knowledge will be individual, ad-hoc, cultural, and tribal. The rise of large language models presents an underrated capacity to serve as a universal communication interface: already now I can use ChatGPT to have near-seamless conversations with people online who don't speak my native language. Voice-capable AIs are starting to be used to handle tedious and exhausting mediation between medical companies for claims checking, where all attempts at the earthy approach of building software to solve ancient medical inefficiencies (many still using physical paper) have failed. Boundaries which were previously preserved by earthy structures will become porous and dissolve; we will all swirl together in every way we can imagine.
We can examine the planetary associations of the different air signs to understand the nature of the age of air. A primary association is the triplicity lords, or the three planets considered to be participants in the matters of the signs of each element. For the air signs of Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, those are Saturn, Mercury, and Jupiter. Together these signify a period marked by both deep struggle, fear, and the tension of the old ways versus the new (Saturn); technology, information, speed, communication, comedy, and trickery (Mercury); and wisdom, access, improvement, faith, and success (Jupiter). Mercury's involvement in the age of air is not to be underestimated: for all of the Saturnian difficulty and Jupiterian worldview-expansion, it's also going to be really funny. In our age memes have real power, which is simply ridiculous--and exactly why it's true.
The sign that the primary span of the elemental age begins with can also be informative to the nature of the age. The beginning of the age of earth in January of 1842 began in Capricorn, and we saw vast industrialization, a deeply capitalist focus, and deep-reaching power struggles which fits Capricorn quite well--not so much the matriculating, detail-and-service-oriented Virgo or the luxurious, sensual and patient Taurus. Each 20 year period will be colored by the individual sign’s nature, but the overarching periods are described by the ingress sign.
The age of air began in the sign of Aquarius. This puts the focus on Saturn, the exiled outsider, collective infrastructure, and systems. Aquarius is a fixed sign (like Taurus, Leo, and Scorpio, the fixed signs of the other elements) which suggests immovability, permanence, and slowness-to-change. This is an interesting juxtaposition with the inherently dynamic and flowing, changing nature of air, but we do see it in the technology that has arisen around us, such as the blockchain, a distributed ledger that anyone can access and records data (an airy thing) permanently (a fixed thing); and monolithic AI models that produce infinite content and variation from fixed datasets.
Aquarius also follows Capricorn, where we first build the fresh thrust of something and sit atop it as a crowning achievement. After that, Aquarius' symbolism as the water pourer comes to the fore: we build the aqueduct, and run water to the people, systematizing the success we established under a Capricorn era. One of Aquarius' primary concerns is the structure of systems which keep humanity alive, whether that be natural rivers or human-made irrigation systems. Since 2020 (and before) we've seen the brewing question: do this society and its systems really work for its people? It certainly doesn't work for all of us, or perhaps even most of us at this point. Is there a better way? How do we get there? What structural, deeply embedded systems accreted over the last 200 years keep us from getting there?
Shifting frames
Quick thinking, dexterity, and flexibility are required to keep up in a world that is changing at breakneck speed. An elemental age is like an overarching metaphysical agenda, a spiritual inspiration that possesses people for its timespan. Culture, technology, and ethos will change to make way for new airy ways of being. Instead of monolithic structures and top-down hierarchies, flatter and decentralized networked systems of organization and collaboration will arise. Information will no longer be spread from a few key sources to the country, but instead from a multiplicity of sources: blogs, podcasts, livestreams, communities, collectives, and more. Endless hallucinatory content and information will have to be curated into meaningful knowledge, sorted and filtered and navigated by AIs which help filter through the noise.
In this era we will likely see the rise of the network state, a nation defined not by geographical boundaries but ideological ones, structured within the fixed-air-y structures of self-hosted and open-source software. Even as we speak, almost all patterns of proprietary software built for corporations now exist as open source tools that merely need to be pulled together so that individuals and communities can govern their own digital lives and ecosystems collectively. The ideals surrounding how best to organize ourselves in the context of a digital world with truly infinite amount of information will change; old and centralized systems are already beginning to show their vulnerability to instantaneous, automated, endless AI actors and an internet where yet more billions of people are coming online. The old systems are structurally not capable of handling this scale and speed.
The biggest challenge I expect people to grapple with is the change in value away from rewarding laborious, time-intensive work toward to rewarding the best (and perhaps quickest) ideas. We are entering an age of abstraction. It's a painful thing to reckon with, but the fact of the matter has always been that level of time and effort into something does not necessarily equal a high level of quality, or even when it does, it does not equal the amount of appreciation or recognition that work receives. This equation is becoming even more lopsided in the age of air, where speed, reach, and alacrity are the name of the game. There's a great saying: "hold on tightly, let go lightly". It means to stick to your direction and belief firmly, but be able to move on from it quickly in light of new information. Things will change rapidly and morph from one form to another, so it's important not to be too precious about any one particular piece but try to guide the entire shape of the thing in the direction you want the wind to blow.
Attribution and ownership will become tricky topics, especially when it's questionable if a human even made something (and to what degree). I expect that blockchain technology will reveal its true metaphysical purpose in the coming decades as a way to transparently and irrevocably testify and trace the origin of a piece of content online. Sourcing and attribution will simultaneously become harder and more important than ever. (This is a complex topic, and if you're interested in it and its intersection with AI, I've written at length about it in my Speculating at the Edge of Infinity essay.) Especially as Pluto moves into collectivist Aquarius in 2026 to oppose the individualistic and authoritative Leo, the nature of authorship is likely to change to support more collaborative, communal, group-oriented thinking and building. Keeping a tight grip over one's own creations, and even identity, may be threatened by the power of the collective. This is a good time to learn how to communicate, collaborate, and set goals among groups of people and share credit. Small test projects and ambitious dreaming with trusted friends are a good way to practice this.
In general, we have to learn how to go even faster. Despite the fact that AI models are built on significant portions of stolen content, have unclear but concerning impacts on energy consumption and resource usage, and generally seem to be something straight out of a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare, the monster is out of the bag. The poison also holds the antidote, and AI--particularly LLMs--will consume the entire world, for both better and worse. (My personal hope around resource usage is that Pluto in Aquarius will also bring us widespread nuclear power adoption and advances in energy sciences, ameliorating the negative impacts of the real culprits--earthy oil-based power production and evaporative liquid cooling systems in data centers.) They can help us with so many things that people don't yet seem to realize that work around or do not incur any real risk of hallucination (which becomes less and less of an issue every month anyway). They are excellent at teaching STEM topics, fundamental history (just don't ask leading questions!), organizing information, formatting data, translating language, and serving as a universal interface layer between software of almost any kind.
I’ve been asking myself constantly: how can I go faster? What problems do I have that make me feel tired just thinking about them? For me most of this is about saving cognitive energy, leveraging AI for those tasks that are laborious yet easily automatable: pulling summaries out of morasses of messy text, writing reusable pieces of code I can put into my personal toolkit, planning and managing complex projects, helping me organize my pantry and prepare meals for the next day. There are so many ways that these tools can help us cope with complexity and information overload, from restructuring to filtering to focusing and even just having someone who has memorized all of Wikipedia whom you can bounce ideas off of and never gets impatient or tired. What old ideas about the way I should be doing things are actually mental blocks, remnants of the slow and laborious earth era?
If you are a knowledge worker or hobbyist, which ranges from people working in tech to people who astrologize everything (yes, you!), you may benefit greatly from learning how to do personal knowledge management as a way to keep track, interrelate, and discover meaning amongst a swirling cloud of endless data. I discuss my own approach to this as someone who also likes to astrologize everything in my essay Personal Knowledge Management for the Astrologically Obsessed, or SADALKASTEN. This fundamentally boils down to a move from hierarchical, folder-oriented thinking to networked, graph-based thinking by linking things together and developing meaning from overarching patterns and connections across many data points. This, incidentally, is how the brain actually functions, but we haven't had the technology that easily approximates it until now.
In software development, there's the idea of the "10x engineer", a unicorn-like creature which outputs code 10x more effectively than most other developers. I like to joke that with AI, I'm now an ♾x engineer--because I am now able to work on projects that I never would have even bothered to do. This applies to all software developers, but also you. Pretty soon you, whether you know how to code or not, will be able to make apps by directing AI. You will be able to describe, in plain language, what functionality you want an app to have, and then an AI creates it whole-cloth. This technology is in its infancy and not ready for people with no development expertise, but an early example is the startup Marblism or the AutoGen framework.
Soon (likely within 5 years, if not 2-3) this technology will be available to anyone with the knowhow (which can also be acquired from the robot and the internet, of course) to build custom, bespoke apps for their friends and communities needs, and connect them to one another. This is the foundation of decentralization: taking knowledge and capabilities from massive centralized corporations and deploying them to personal and communal uses where people can pool resources to achieve their goals. This transformation is even happening in the world of open-source LLMs--while models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Claude's Sonnet are the best in class, open source development and compilation of increasingly skilled and accessible models are being developed that you can run on a MacBook Pro. The logical conclusion is that different communities (or even individual people) could have custom-tuned models designed for the tasks and knowledge sets that people themselves care about.
Of course, there are distinct and frightening downsides to the age of air starting in the fixed and Saturn-ruled sign of Aquarius. Discretion about what you share online is more important than ever. Things on the internet do disappear, but as decentralization continues then more and more people will be archiving the things they care about (things they both like and dislike). Certain technologies such as blockchain encode information permanently, which can be trivially found by automated processes and AI agents. As it becomes easier than ever to be triangulated by your digital footprint online, it's important to practice good operational security, which is a constant tradeoff between visibility/expression and privacy/safety. Public figures with identifiable wealth or resources are always susceptible to wrench attacks. The collective nature of Aquarius can point to destruction wrought by the many and sentencing in the court of public opinion, which at times can be dangerous to life and livelihood.
There's no way to talk around it: Saturn-ruled periods are difficult. They stress foundations and crumble those which cannot handle the pressure. They are times of illness and pain and suffering, and the reward usually only comes at the end of a lengthy and arduous journey. While I try to look at the upsides of change as a way of staying buoyant and feeling empowered in the midst of chaos, it's obvious that many of us are not feeling optimistic. This is a time of conflict and strife, which is as destructive as it can be generative. Personally, I view adapting the ways of air as being a bid for survival in an epoch that is poised to sweep us all up within it. We can either become the wind, or be eroded by it. As some say, The Collapse of Civilisation is an Unprecedented Opportunity. I hope it'll be less dramatic than that, but I plan to prepare nonetheless.
The best way to prepare is to embrace and expect instability. Invest in yourself, your knowledge, and your capacity. Invest in your friends and relationships, too--build together, and keep your friends' contact information (memorized or written on paper, not just the contacts app) in case of emergencies. I expect this era to start off in a bumpy, confusing, and adversarial way. (It already has, hasn’t it?) Strive to be equal parts savvy and loving; shrewd as snakes and harmless as doves. Build up your memetic defenses against misinformation and cultural warfare; other countries are spreading misinformation through our social media, and most people are not equipped to defend themselves. Simultaneously and paradoxically, you should keep an open mind (but not so open your brain falls out, as Carl Sagan put it). Multidisciplinarianism and synthesis are the names of the game, and being able to pluck useful signals out of the noise is an essential skill.
I also firmly believe that it’s important to own your tools and your digital ecosystem; I cannot recommend having your own personal website and feed enough. The 80s-00 era of geocities is back, baby. Opting out entirely of centralized software is difficult at this time, but will get increasingly easy as we go. Threads now has (currently one-way) integration with the ActivityPub protocol (Mastodon), with more capabilities to come. I expect we will have nicely polished bridges between other federated protocols like Bluesky’s AT Protocol in the next couple years, as well. Learning the basics of code, even just to be able to write small scripts to format your own data or do simple tasks can pay off exponentially in the long run.
Ironically, it will be more important than ever to be able to hold the other three elements we are comprised of in balance, too. We can't opt out of the age of air, but we can engage with it intentionally. Taking time to unplug and rest is critical. I find an appropriately airy metaphor in the practice of box breathing, where you breathe in for four (or some number of) seconds, hold the breath for four, breathe out for four, and hold for four. Repeat. We can do something similar here: take in the wild winds of this era, contemplate and digest it, return it to the world, and then take some time for ourselves. Repeat. Excessive exposure to elements of any kind will kill you, but by harnessing the currents of the moment mindfully and with intention, we can repurpose it into a conduit that we can wield to call down lightning.
A most notable part of the age of air will be an interest in the ether, the invisible something-stuff lurking behind space that we dismissed in the age of earth. More and more people are interested in astrology than ever, and generally curious about old (Saturnian) ways of thinking. This is a great time for individuals to engage with the practice of magic as a way to hone intention, no matter how simple or small. For a literally airy approach, I recommend the book Life Force: Sensed energy in breathwork, psychedelia and chaos magic, which is a fascinating read into different forms of breathwork. For a pragmatic, grounded, and deeply sensible approach to magic that embraces the pursuit of optionality, I recommend Aiden Wachter's books, particularly Six Ways. And for a good intersection into many practices and fundamental skillsets, Mat Auryn's Psychic Witch is also excellent. Just as a fair warning, you can get yourself into trouble with magic. The best way to ameliorate this is with divination: tarot, dice, astrology, geomancy, and other forms of sense-making which touch the unseen.
As time moves forward, we will see rapid changes in almost every facet of society, technology, and culture. For the first time, I am hopeful that we will have a real moment to take back some of what has been extracted from us for so long: our time, our labor, our energy, and our freedom. It won't be without bumps, bruises, and probably worse, but all I can do is hope that we come out the other end with deeper connections with each other and ourselves. Remember: keep breathing.
For more essays and guides, you can check out the rest of my Substack (obligatory subscribe button below) or my personal website at sadalsvvd.space.
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