LA IN FLAMES
On astrology, technology, and fire
This is a bit of a departure from our usual programming – an essay from Nemesis co-founder Emily Segal on uncertainty and our technological future in the context of the Los Angeles fires.
I write this with Los Angeles in flames, burning much more comprehensively than any of us could have imagined, or rather exactly how we always knew it would, LA in flames being the primordial image of the city (as the famous quote reminds us). I'm in Palm Springs, lucky to be at a family friend's house with my partner and six month old, and with our friends whose Altadena house is miraculously still standing (but will that miracle become a nightmare because of insurance fallout or the curse of a poisonous home?) Being with babies – my baby and their baby, who is a week older than mine – both makes everything more terrifying and pulls you unrelentingly into the present. Which is useful, and strange.
Earlier this morning I stood there in the guest bedroom putting on underwear which I had bought at Walmart during another crisis that had taken me away from home. They had been temporary, then they faded into my everyday. Nude with a cheap, commercial snake pattern. Today is the serpent full moon. NASA may call it the Wolf moon, but my friend and collaborator Chris Reppucci, who taught me astrology, whose practice charts the lunar space of the sky, calls it serpent.
"This is a Shape of primordialism, upwelling waters, axis coiled snakes, World Serpents spinning reality into form, and the maximized potential of being very pregnant with the manifestation of a reality ready to hatch," writes Chris.
At times like these I become obsessed with astrology. Not for the obvious reasons, or the reasons you may think, such as a hunger for the future, an attempt to trick myself into knowing what will happen as a way to distract myself from the fact that I never know what will happen, for certainty in the face of fireballs (a bid to trade the planetary fireballs for the terrestrial ones, in this case). No, I come back to it as a container for thinking that keeps me from feeling overwhelmed, a way to hold the change more neutrally than what my mind organically offers. Astrology is a system and way of thinking (or self-deluding, depending on your perspective) that can contextualize and recontextualize these massive currents. As we sit here future-nauseous and attempt to assimilate the new reality of the fires and of the city, still a developing story, still breaking news. "Increasing winds bring potential for ‘explosive fire growth’ across L.A. County this week," reads this morning’s LA Times headline. Meanwhile, other friends have already gone home. “It seems nice here,” they say, “can’t smell a thing…”
The etymology behind the serpent moon "harkens back to the Chinese myth and warning to make sure you are paying close attention, to cross your T’s and dot your I’s, as well as the idea of hypnotization via fixation on an object, the transfixed gaze of being witness to phenomenon," Chris continues. "Once you see the whole world hatch into existence from the world-egg you cannot unsee it."
Many of our friends have lost their homes, archives, work – everything, or almost everything, or more than everything. Friends post that they've lost even more than they'd ever imagined. Meanwhile our babies bang a comb into a mixing bowl, they giggle on yellow bed spreads, milk drips from the corners of their mouths. It's currently Mars retrograde, a transit I'd feared for months. You all probably know Mercury retrograde by now. Mars retrograde is similar in that it's a time when Mars appears to be traveling backwards in the sky and the significations of the planet are reversed. Mars being energy, drive, war, initiative, yang. All go haywire, become the most evil, deranged versions of themselves, or go empty, dry, dead. I've felt the most enervated in my life during Mars retrogrades. It was Mars retrograde during the 2020 fires that were started by a gender reveal. In my haste, I've only brought pink clothes for my baby. Every last piece of baby pink and everything covered in hearts. Every day is Valentine's Day in the apocalypse.
These crises bring me to astrology and to technology and back. New moons and full moons come in pairs. The serpent full moon calls back to its new moon on July 5, the day after my due date. As the sky exploded with firecrackers. And the dogs shivered and whined. And a different kind of ash fell on the city. Today's moon is its partner, a serpent full moon conjunct Mars retrograde in cancer. A bright light shining right there with the lord of the fires. The full moon conjunct the mars retrograde suggests the fullness of the situation. Hopefully it’s something like a turning point, the culmination point of this part of the catastrophe. Perhaps it means things will begin to wane, but of course there's no way for me to know. Knowing without knowing is kind of my thing – I'm in the uncertainty business, after all. The text document in front of me describes my company: "Nemesis helps ambitious founders understand and design for cultural complexity. Sometimes that understanding is called trend forecasting because that complexity involves a rapidly approaching, uncertain future..."
I go back into the guest bedroom to feed the baby and call Chris. On the phone, he explains that the part of the sky called serpent signifies the "let there be light" moment when the whole world is revealed in all its primordial abundance, teeming with everything, good and bad included. A moment to look at all of god's creation and to see it all, squirming and huge. Which suggests to me the brightness of the blaze, and a surge in our awareness that we are in a new era, a new situation, a new zeitgeist.
I've been anticipating and dreading this year since 2020. During COVID lockdown, on Zoom, we did an astro-tech working group (Galen, Kei, Cab, Martti, Chris and I) and we looked at this far away psychotic year 2025 in which many major planets would change position, Pluto would finally be in Aquarius until 2043, and Uranus would be in Gemini (like it had been during the Civil War). Also in this strange future year Mars retrograde (dry, harsh, destructive, disorienting) would go through Cancer (the sign of the mother and child, intimate and cloistered, the soft wet stuff of life itself). I remembered thinking what if I have a baby then, and there's a war. I wasn't married in 2020, I didn't have a baby, my book wasn't out, I was on bipolar meds. It was a different time. It's always a different time, that's the point of astrology. Even when aspects or transits come back, they are same-same-but-different.
Here in 2025 we all were trying to sing Wizard of Oz songs to the babies, but couldn't remember the words. "With the thoughts that you'll be thinkin'/ You could be another Lincoln...if you only had a brain." Isn't it disturbing that the Civil War was to them as World War II is to us, said my friend. The movie at the heart of burning Hollywood. At the deep vibrating core of the American dream machine itself. I remember living in 2020 looking at 2025 and seeing the paths of the planets, how after Mars retrograde razes Cancer, then Jupiter will come in to bless it (starting in June). Jupiter the planet of wisdom, expansion, gifts and opportunity, especially beautiful and exalted in Cancer. This is, of course, almost impossible to imagine at the moment. What kind of blessings could possibly reach this razed earth? This infernal real estate market? How could it be possible?
Blessings are difficult to imagine. More palpable is our technofuture bleeding rapidly into the technopresent. Pluto in future-forward, freaky-deaky Aquarius seems to be all about decentralization and AI and the fringes of things and making cyberpunk visions into reality (including their horrors). As I type this Bill Ackman tweets about how he'd like to invest in what would essentially be drone-led predictive climate policing ("with no DEI risk"). Chris believes that Pluto in Aquarius will mean there are finally multiple internets, instead of just one, something that's come up over and over again in Nemesis conversations with protocols and decentralized clients.
In our Palm Springs living room a little technological scene plays out. There is a Whatsapp chat of my friend's Altadena neighbors, with people sharing their addresses, names and phone numbers – inconsistently and willy nilly among a great deal of other information in long surges. Could Chatgpt turn the downloaded chat transcript into a properly formatted spreadsheet? Maybe, but not with my prompts. Not quickly or easily enough. The neighbors couldn't share an open document for people to fill in themselves because the data was sensitive and it could easily fall into the hands of people outside the community. Yet my friend was fried from nearly losing her home and most of her possessions, and wasn't in the best place for data entry. The various phone tree apps that could've worked (or at least lightened the load) seemed like they would be too strange or unusable for the elderly people in the group. So we have the almost-but-not-quite of practical AI application, we have the unusability of technology for the groups that most need it, we have group chats as the seeds of little internets. I do think this last thing is important, group chats as the primitives. It's easy to imagine these small intersecting networks with more functions and more modular privacy settings. It's easy to imagine not wanting to share your information publicly in times of crisis or vulnerability. It's easy to imagine not knowing who is on the other side, just as you need them most intensely.
In the midst of all this, our babies are just old enough to see and grasp for and swat at our phones. Just as we most want to get them out of their faces we can't tear ourselves away. I feed my baby with my face glued to my phone. I film her blowing spit bubbles and she reaches for the camera. One day, if we are lucky, this will be lore. The fires when you were six months old. How we lost power and left LA and drove to the desert. How Zeno came to stay with us. How you played with your magical bowl, clanging the measuring cups and comb and keychain because we didn't bring enough toys for you, but you loved it. Before everything changed. When everything was already changing. Chris says our honeymoon with digital technology is over and now we want to ditch it more than ever just as we really need it. I want to hide my phone from my baby and I simply cannot. I suspect some will try to tear this relationship up from the root and reject technology in more extreme and violent ways than we have seen in the last few decades. Others will welcome more surveillance, more overlap, more connectedness, more predictive drones. It seems like Hollywood is burning down, the American dream (in the form of the family home) is burning down, and AI is blazing up, dronelike, godlike, contrived, contaminated and fearsome. Astrologically speaking, technologically speaking, we are the beginning of a long disruptive epoch with terrifying qualities and beautiful ones. I'm partially compartmentalizing and staying as close to the present as I can, in baby time, in drool time, on the carpet. I'm staying close to the creature wiggling on the rug. The pink hearts roll on the floor and the big moon rises in the sky. Here we go.
A couple of good links to help, among the many (thank you Blaine O’Neill):
LA fire mutual aid resources:
X thread with fire-related Gofundme links that are below 30% of their goals:
Powerful writing. Thank you.
Thank you. This was extraordinarily good.