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Notes -
Sorry, I'm going out of order.
I saw a tweet a while back saying something like: if you meet a straight guy that knows his Moon Sign, he's been ran through.
A personal low-stakes conspiracy theory: "The Pattern" and similar apps got very popular around 2020, and a lot of my female friends got super into it. I don't think any of them really believe in it, but they would all read it, every day, and at one point I downloaded so my wife could see what it told me.
I joked, at the time, that Bloomberg was going to secretly take over The Pattern as part of his primary campaign, so that on primary day every girlie would get a message pointing them towards voting for Bloomberg. "Your month looks risky, it's important that you pick a leader you can trust, like Mike Bloomberg."
Even if the users don't take it too seriously, it's an app that literally tells one how to think, feel, act. Think of the advertising and influence opportunities! The potential to Nudge! Especially when combined with, what I'm sure are, generous permissions that allow the app to track where you are, and what you're doing across other apps, and use it to form a clear customer profile. Tinder wants to close the sale for premium? "We see romance in your future this week, take the plunge and take a chance!" Fanduel wants you to up your weekly bets on NBA games? "Jupiter is in the shadow of Mars this week, fortune favors the bold, you can't lose!" Financial adviser wants to sign you up? "The skies are looking stormy ahead, seek safe harbors and kind advice." This kind of vague, fortune cookie advice, is typical of astrology charts, but could maybe "nudge" someone towards a desired action. And it's totally unaccountable! The customers don't even really expect you to be right! Most won't even admit they think about it!
My wife enjoys astrology as a little game she takes half seriously, and in my opinion what superstitions like that provide is "seasonality." By which I mean, a degree of randomization that allows you to vary your actions in ways that are useful or pleasing. Optimal strategies for many games require a degree of randomization, and human happiness tends to respond well to variation. Variety is the spice of life that gives it all its flavor. But the nature of modernity is that we've eliminated a lot of the required randomness from our lives, a lot of the seasonality. We can eat any food we want at any time of year. We watch any movie we want, regardless of whether it is in theaters or on TV or if the VHS is in stock at Blockbuster. If I want to buy something, say a new Burberry trench coat, I don't have to plan my annual trip to the Good mall a couple hours away, I can do it on my phone and have it shipped to my house. If I want to read a new book, and my library doesn't have it, I'm not hunting around for it, I'm just buying it off Amazon or downloading it off LibGen.
In that world, it's easy to settle into a rut, into a Baridan's Ass equilibrium that's not ideal but that you have no reason to depart from. Literally just changing some things for the sake of changing them (the Coolidge Effect?) would improve your life, but why will you choose to do it?
Astrology provides something of an answer to that question. If you follow it, it gives you reasons to randomize your actions, in ways that will often improve your life, if not substantively at least experientially.
Consider how Sign-Compatibility can help you choose a mate. Imagine yourself as a young woman in SF, with a job somewhere on the soft side of tech in PR or HR or XR or whatever. You have many suitors, but they are all more or less replacements for each other, none of them are so much better than the others that you feel the need to commit. You know, at some level, you'll be happier if you commit to any of them, but it's tough to choose without a reason. You break out of your equidistant bails of hay by a randomized process, what does The Pattern tell you on the day of the date, or how does their time of birth indicate compatibility with your time of birth?
Or consider the old trope of a person being totally conflicted on a yes/no decision, can't choose between two women or whatever. Another character enters the room and, hearing their indecision, takes a coin out of their pocket and says "fine, I'll flip the coin, heads you go with Jessica tails you go with Sarah." He flips the coin, the first character jumps up and says no don't do that, the second character, rather than revealing what the coin landed on, asks him "Which are you hoping it landed on?" And in that moment, the first character knows which choice to make. Interpretations of signs can help us interpret our own desires and beliefs intuitively, cutting through the noise. A simple horoscope like "Trust the right people today." is inherently useless on a rational level: who are the right people? How will I know what to trust them with? But on an intuitive level, a vague instruction like that gives you room to realize what you wanted to do all along, to interpret your own desires. LLMs serve much the same purpose, as do consultants at the corporate level.
As a last personal note, I will say that I have never followed astrology but I have two major superstitions.
One, I always considered it good luck to see a hawk, because I liked them when I was a kid. Significant conservation efforts at the Federal and State levels, along with changing demographics and development that have made habitats for Hawks friendlier, have brought Hawk populations back towards health in my area. Where in the past I might only see one once a month and it was a major "sign" of something. Now I see them most days. Maybe the magic is gone, or maybe I am mystically tied to seeing hawks and my life is just that much better now, which might be accurate.
The other is that Wawa receipts for MTO items come in with three digit numbers, and my wife and I consider it a major sign when we get a single digit Wawa receipt, and to a lesser extent the other "special" numbers like 333 or 999 or 420 etc. The first time I got a 001 receipt, my wife went in for a life changing job interview. We also had a terrible day the day we got 000. These are important.
Are we at the point, now, where Wawa hoagies can become an official Motte meme?
I'll throw in an effortpost on the Sheetz/Wawa dichotomy later this week.
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Your theory about The Pattern is some top-tier schizoposting, we need more of this.
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