Horary 0011: Is Twitter Going to Die Soon?
Overview
The website you’re currently reading began its life as a Twitter account and had a remarkably fruitful creative and social life there. A couple years into that life, Twitter was personally acquired by real-life comic book supervillain Elon Musk, who immediately began — to use his own terminology from when one of his private rocket ships explodes — its “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Fearing for the online place I loved most at the time, I cast a horary chart about whether its demise was imminent, and I predicted that it was.
Enough has transpired since then that I am comfortable judging the prediction correct. Given that the application formerly known as Twitter is still online, this will require some qualification, which I will lay out in advance.
There are several ways to identify “Twitter” as an entity, and more ways to define its “death,” and many important ones go beyond the timeframe of this prediction. I refer you to @sadalsvvd’s much more expansive investigation of various aspects of Twitter, which indicates other still ongoing factors. I will note, however, that he also found significant doom omens for the same date I predicted.
There are two specific criteria on which my prediction made March 13, 2023 should be judged.
The first is the significator I assigned to represent what “Twitter” means for this purpose, which, as you will see, signified not the company nor the software but rather the network-entity from which those things derived all their value.
The second is the precise timing I gave for the “death” event, which was the week of May 8, 2023. This write-up comes many months after that predicted date, as I was still processing the unfolding of this massive and unprecedented transformation of a network of hundreds of millions of people, and I was going back and forth all the while about whether the prediction could be judged correct.
I will now make the case that both of these criteria have been met, including the timing of the week of May 8.
Judgment
I gave my astrological reasoning in the prediction post, but I will recount them for the current context.
Given that this was a personal divinatory inquiry — as opposed to a collective investigation involving origin charts such as the one @sadalsvvd is conducting — I assigned myself the ascendant ruler, the Moon.
(Months later we would learn this decan of Cancer is probably Elon Musk’s natal rising decan — which @sadalsvvd also correctly predicted — but that’s proooooooooobably not material to this judgment… right?)
I took the Moon just past the 5th house cusp in Sagittarius to radically signify me making creative stuff out in the wilds of Twitter subject the largesse of Jupiter, who also rules the midheaven and thus signifies the company and/or its ownership. I also noted Neptune bang on the MC as an evocative description of the absolute confusion unfolding at that corporate level.
But the 10th house does not describe my relationship to the Twitter about whose death I was concerned. I have always felt somewhat antipathetic towards the company, regardless of its ownership. It is the network that constituted what Twitter was to me, and that was the only Twitter who could die in a way that mattered to me. Thus, for the purposes of this question, I assigned it Mars, ruler of the 11th house of networks.
I also noted that, as 2nd from the 10th, the 11th house would signify the company’s finances, and that financial ruin would be the most ultimate and true cause of death of Twitter as a going concern. While the concern is still going, I think it’s fair to say it’s not going well financially. More importantly, though, the network is the actual value of Twitter. Money can keep a worthless thing in zombie mode for quite a while after it is exhausted of real value, as we know from basically everything about the contemporary world.
Adding to the appeal of Mars as a significator here, Mars transited Gemini for seven entire months last spring — thanks to a retrograde cycle — in what felt like an excruciatingly literal signification of the world’s biggest Mars fan making a complete fool of himself impulsively trying to buy Twitter, trying to back out of buying it, eventually being forced to buy it, and then proceeding to redecorate it in his inimitably terrible style. At the time this horary was cast, that transit was almost over, and the reality had settled in that Mars boy would own this platform until whatever happened next.
I delineated the outcome through Mars’ next series of aspects. The first two aspects are soon, and they’re simultaneous enough that I decided to take it as one. A Mercury cazimi — an exact conjunction of Mercury and the Sun — would contact Mars by square in just a couple degrees. As two house cusps fall in the Sun’s sign of Leo, this event is a climactic impact of four topics simultaneously with our quesited matter, Twitter-the-network.
The Sun rules the 2nd and 3rd house, signifying my resources and local community, and Mercury rules the 12th house of prisons and the 4th house of home. I think I actually shortchanged Mercury’s importance in my initial write-up, not using either of those much more basic house significations. I gave Mercury the technical horary significations of “the verdict” or “the end of the matter” — as well as the IC’s spatially literal signification of “the grave,” as the lowest point in the sky. That early in my horary career, I just took this as a vague death omen, yet I continued on past this aspect for the judgment without explaining why.
From here at 111 charts later, I see it much more literally now, with a very clear reason to keep looking ahead: This remarkable simultaneous two-planet square signifies my community (3H) packing up our stuff (2H), busting out of the prison of corporate social media silos (12H), and making a real online home (4H). And importantly, we would do this successfully, before Twitter as we know it died. That much is clear from the part I delineated next.
In this horary, Mars is nearing the end of that interminable Gemini transit. I’m sure that’s why I instinctively wanted to keep pushing it ahead, because the next aspect happened while it was still in this starting condition, and a new condition was coming. That condition was Mars’ ingress into Cancer, the sign of its fall (and also, as I mentioned, the presumed rising sign of Elon Musk). Immediately upon doing so, it slams into Saturn, natural significator of death and ruler of this chart’s 8th house, making it the accidental significator of death as well.
That was so unquestionable a sign that I felt the Mars/Saturn aspect was not only a “yes” but a timed yes. The aspect perfects in 8º, and with Mars in a mutable sign and cadent house, I took that as a “medium” unit of time and predicted the death would come in eight weeks, the week of May 8.
Outcome
The absurd amount of turmoil that befell Twitter in the months following this prediction does not require recounting here. I will cite just two news events in the predicted timeframe as evidence for the outcome.
On April 4, legal filings revealed that Twitter had ceased to exist as a legal entity. Twitter Inc. was merged into a holding company owned by Musk and renamed X Corp., making good on Musk’s lifelong determination to make literally anything he could call X, because of how obviously cool of a thing to do that is.
On May 12, in the week predicted by this horary, Musk hired hapless advertising executive Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new CEO. Then, with blame for his failures laid squarely at the feet of a fall-woman, he set about dismantling everything Twitter ever was. It’s called 𝕏 now.
My internet friends and I now hang out elsewhere.
Analysis
Yes, 𝕏 still continues to function, after a fashion. Musk is threatening to charge all users money to access it, which surely some minority of the hateful grotesqueries who enjoy the new regime will willingly do, even though Yaccarino apparently had no idea that was happening until someone asked her about it on stage. It still might not happen. The point is, I don’t care. Twitter, the thing we all liked, is absolutely dead. Whatever 𝕏 is, it is not that network anymore.
Follow me on ActivityPub, the network where you can own your own social media infrastructure, which I do. By the way, did I mention that Meta (née Facebook) decided to launch a Twitter clone this summer to take advantage of all this madness? Who knows if that’ll work, but anyway, they’re going to integrate their app with ActivityPub, and when that happens, why would anyone stay on the closed, janky, costly outrage network 𝕏 anymore?
I should note that at the time of this question Twitter was so unstable that “days” seemed like a reasonable “short” unit of time in which to predict Twitter’s demise, hence the inclusion of the word “soon” in my question. The matter felt urgent. This produced a correct timing prediction of an event key to this judgment. However, if we were to take the more sober horary timing scale of “weeks/months/years,” that would give us a timeframe of eight months from the question. I wish Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino a very merry early November 13, 2023, just in case.
