The Ghost in the Shell

Gemini New Super Moon

“Burnout isn’t failure. It’s feedback.”

A tweet from The Femme Genius came across my screen just when I needed to see it. As an ADHD (but unmedicated) freelance employed space case, my many worn hats overlap, each role requiring a long to-do list I must multi-task thru. This never-ending loop of jumping thru a series of hoops to make ends meet AND to keep doing it over and over while pushing the boulder up the hill and down again it goes… my Sisyphus-style life lately does not feel sustainable… but neither are the expectations of us in late stage capitalism’s economic instability. Additionally, being a meme admin makes me want to throw my phone out the window even tho tech has been its own welcome window, a portal I have peered into nearly all my life to access not just fantasy and friends but expression and expansion.

I’ve been fascinated with computers since archaic black-and-white Tetris time with my Gemini prog-rock dad. Later the dings of Brian Eno’s Microsoft opening would draw me into hours of immersed 8-bit sparkle with Legend of Kyrandia and Simon the Sorcerer. As a teen, I downloaded the entire Cocteau Twins discography (including their Fruitopia commercials and Christmas numbers) on UseNet. I learned code for LiveJournal, CSS-ed a site for my collages and poems via HTML hacks and as Moderator for GetCrafty was delighted to co-sign features, share feedback and beta-test a new online shop platform called Etsy. I’d sell screen-printed Kate Bush tees, a dream to be on the team in my youth but as an elder millennial seeing what Etsy became? Not so much. Being online offered immense access to IDEAS esp. re: feminism and socialism (a semi-topic from the Aries Eclipse) and I have similar sentiments about the discourse around politics today versus then.

Kate Fagan wasn’t wrong when commenting on the currency of tech immersion for youth: “Digital life, and social media at its most complex, is an interweaving of public and private personas, a blending and splintering of identities unlike anything other generations have experienced.” Having been plugged in since my earliest days, I was highly impressionable during Saturn in Pisces 1993-1996 aka the dot-com bubble and the internet was a delight. Rediscovering its creative terrain during early pandemic boredom is the reason The Femme Moon formed, though logging on now can feel like a source of dread with the immense ugliness in the world (I question if it was always there and we just have more access to awareness now). The greater scope of social media as convenience and connection but also tracking, surveillance, harassment, poor self-image, urgency culture is distressing.

Algo-suppression is a topic that has been extremely prominent over 2025 thus far though we’ve been dealing with the “shadow ban” for the past 5 years with rapid aggression and little to no warning. Of course these platforms DO NOT have our best interest(s) in mind. From the obvious undercutting of organizational reach since Black Lives Matter to locked accounts of those speaking out against the Israeli-U.S. military operations, we’re being watched and punished while white supremacists are often not slapped whatsoever (and it’s come to my attention Substack is very lax in these matters as well). The fine line between tech companies and government is no longer covert with tech bros Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk befriending Trump (tho the latter is on the outs and/or will be used as a scapegoat to distract).

It’s unfortunate that our daily scroll of cute dog videos and mystical affirmations and Squidward memes are tied to disproportionate surveillance and the military industrial complex more strongly than we realize… but that’s always been the nature of tech, always up for grabs and in the interest of advancement by government intelligence agencies. Gemini Mercury (and Uranus) Brian Eno recently made a statement re: Microsoft providing tech to Israel, noting “systematic ethnic cleansing” by proxy: “If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes.” Using Meta is to be part of a parasitic process of creating content for free to push advertising and further growing an obsession with the attention economy is to be somewhat in bed with Christo-Fascists. And yet social media can be extremely helpful to resistance movements and planning.

Occasionally I think about what it is to be “plugged in”, my online life and the blur between the tangible. Furthermore, I’ll often recall the mind-expansive theories of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and her take on the cybernetic organism. Haraway’s vision, no matter how seemingly unrealistic, created an incredibly important philosophical viewpoint that informed my personal relationship to feminism, identity and the collective… and beyond. Her recognition of the intended separation of the natural world by colonialism and the patriarchy alone notes the immense reliance on dualism’s aim to “worth”-build socialized values (and degradation). The intention to create a divide is in effect utilized to pit people (and animals) against one another in order to oppress and dominate. Haraway’s urges to deconstruct the political social reality were important to posthumanism even if coming from western white feminism. Operating within this framework while struggling to move out of it is part of her point… and she recognized the irony to it, too.

“Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as Other.”

A Cyborg Manifesto offered an anthropological, philosophical and ethical response to boundaries and limitations of categorization, not just an alternative but seeing a possibility to break from identity and societal framework that had thus far led to harm and pain, encouraging people to loosen the chains of hierarchy and distinction, ignoring categories designed to separate and instead be the one to decide for oneself. Instead of obeying expectations, the cyborg re-assembles, re-constructs, re-imagines a Future that thrives without the reliance of defined differences and even that of similarities. As an author with a PhD in Biology from Yale, Haraway’s disdain of gender-essentialism was (I’m sure) refreshing at the time of publication. Props to the claims that there is no “state of being female”, a TERF’s worst feminist theory nightmare. Additionally, many psychs and philosophers were annoyed with Freud (understandably) but Haraway stated specifically that the concept of solid self-containment as a measure of sanity was particularly ick.

WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

Haraway considered the cyborg an “illegitimate offspring” of techno-fascist overlords, creating their own means of communication and exploration with self-autonomy to network in radical manners that in no way align with a father-figure creation origin story and its subsequent servitude. When I observe my own relationship to social media and the mass wave of IG deactivations thus far in 2025, I can not help think about the neuroticism that comes with pained self-awareness around not just persona and perception but time and rapid absorption of data. To follow or reject Instagram’s ever-changing cryptic “rules”? I see why some have fled, others have decided to be gay as possible on the app but the helpless and heartbroken repetition in witnessing horrific news wears down on the soul either way.

Released 40 years ago in 1985, A Cyborg Manifesto is an essay I think of every Gemini Season, a forever relevant antidote to Duality. Gemini as an archetype of Two Sides has always felt like a gross understatement as Mutable Air is a master of multitudes, not one or two beings but many. Their lust for info and controversial conversational adventure of gathering ideas, inspecting and pondering ON ALL OF IT… With stereotypes ranging from Devil’s Advocate to flippant fluttering fae, Gemini’s to-and-fro typecast of being two-faced is highly inaccurate and downright annoying in astro-pop. Gemini should be viewed for their wide wisdom, whimsy, humor and heart, but above all, we forget that The Twins emit an aura of possibility, setting out a smorgasbord of sensational infinity. To make something out of nothing, like light and sound takes a moment to exist and a lifetime of learning to process how it came to be, what we see and hear in the quick atmosphere of being and becoming is amorphous and can not be bought and sold.

WHAT: Super New Moon in Gemini

WHEN: May 26th-27th, 2025 11:02 PM EST

THEME: Kill the Cyber C*p in Your Head

Many of us left Taurus Season with this heaviness despite its mostly flowing slowness. The heart-space of the Springtime ignited the glimmer but that glow became a glower with the Scorpio Full Moon. The exhaustion of her exposure, a Vampire scorched by the Sun, spotlit resources in lack, crisis about the state of “stuff”, the passion of passive micro-aggression in our support systems. AND with the Uranus Cazimi in Taurus on the Season’s final weekend, where we’ve been trying to cling to the graveyards between what we want and what we need have led to confusion around aspirations that may have become obsessions. Bottom line though, humanity has been forced into a position of how to create safety, what possibilities can be present, if we can even materialize dreams in the blood-soak of this Material World.

The Gemini New Moon is one of the most uplifted lunation before we meet the Summer Solstice and we’re finally catching an astrologically kind break from the cosmos, though not without tough confrontations of how we’ve been operating and for some dissociating. When optimized and optimistically realistic, Gemini Season is a frenetic facilitator of dialogue but wakes our minds in a refreshing jolt. There is NO “black-and-white thinking” only an effortless ability to move through the macro of the World and the micro of social situations with spiny tingly senses of both intellect and emotion. Gemini’s amazing asset we all can draw inspiration from is their gift of gab, a zany zest infusing interactions with intellectual kink exploration and is most refreshing for those of us stuck in some kind of funk.

Depiction of Gemini Sun Marilyn Monroe

With Pluto currently back-spinning in Aquarius, Saturn moving into Aries days before the Gemini New Moon and Jupiter moving into Cancer soon, Gemini’s Moon holds space for us to progress before Planetary Shift Summer and beyond, perhaps into the nature and nurture of our “needs”. With spicy indecision at the helm, afraid one misstep will doom us towards “less” opportunity in the dystopian direction we’re heading… examining ourselves and our stocks in fluctuation between fear and love, leftist community is buzzing, knowing it must recognize its own mannerism that mock the master they claim to be up against. The question of what is sustainable, the ways it must change… community thrives and shrinks on different wavelengths of communication. The courage to un-learn and re-invent is the mobility that moves us beyond the horizon.