Astrology of Corporate Entities

An automagically-generated natal chart for Unix. No, really.

This portion of the site assumes slight familiarity with astrology. If you’ve no knowledge of it beyond “I’m a Virgo,” or something, you can pick up the basics easily, but the particularities are a struggle. This site does not provide that kind of information, because I’m still learning, myself. I think activities like this are helpful. So, what’s this page about? Why does a site about coding, nostalgia, and that sort of thing have an astrology section?

I’m here interested in, ahem, very online, very mundane astrology.

In truth, nothing about astrology ought be called mundane, as far as I’m concerned. Still, so-called “mundane” astrology focuses on exploring charts that concern world events rather than the life of the individual. Traditionally, this has involved looking at the “birth times” of various nations and city-states throughout history. For example, there have been plenty of attempts to understand the trajectory of the United States by casting charts using the date and approximate time that the Declaration of Independence was signed. Here, I am doing similar, but with an approach I hope better suits the time we live in.

Astrologers in ages past focused on the destinies of nations and rulers primarily; here, I focus on corporations, computing, and related matters. The corporate world and the vast, hungry entities that inhabit it probably play a greater role in determining our future, sadly, than does any individual politician (up to and including Donald Trump). So, my focus is there, as well as on some (seemingly) frivolous topics, like the history of computing itself.

Either way, I’m interested in the “birthdays” (and corresponding times, if I can find them) that various web services went online. This allows me to cast potential natal charts for those apps and sites, just like I would a person. I’m often completely unsure what to make of these charts, but I’ll be sharing them, as well as my own thoughts, as I cast them.

For now, I’m merely sharing the birthdays for the ones I’ve yet to cast yet, in case anyone else wants to have a go. I am, as well, open to posting and sharing any thoughts other folks might have about these charts. Almost all of them will be heavily limited by the fact that I just don’t have a birth time for these things.

For those curious, I prefer (and will be using) a Hellenistic, whole-sign approach to astrology, though I do have immense respect for many other systems.

I’ve cast some charts but thus far not interpreted them (because I’m not that good). I am including only the Unix chart so far, but more will follow. Mostly, I’m hoarding birthdays and going through them, bit by bit, alongside my large book on Hellenistic astrology. Below, though, you can see some of the sun signs of the entities (or corporate egregores, one might say) in question, though.

When Did This All Start?

Unix Time began at 12am GMT on January 1st, 1970 (♑). Read more about it here. View Unix’s chart here.
Eternal September insofar as it marks a watershed incident, can be dated to September 1st, 1993 (♍).
Amazon was launched on July 16th, 1995 (♋) in Bellevue, Washington. View an approximate chart for Amazon here.
Google was born on September 4th, 1996 (♍).
4chan was launched on October 1st, 2003 (♎), by a student from New York City. View 4chan’s approximate chart here.
Facebook was born on February 4, 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (♒). View Facebook’s initial approximate chart here.
Reddit was born on June 23, 2005 (♋).
Twitter was born on July 15, 2006 (♋).
Facebook began allowing all users on September 26th, 2006 (♎).
Tumblr was born on February 19, 2007 (on the ♒ to ♓ cusp because of course it was).
Neocities, which hosts this site, was born on June 28th, 2013 (♋).
Discord was born on May 13th, 2015 (♉).
TikTok launched on September 13th, 2017 (♍).
Twitter became Elon Musk’s X.com on May 18th, 2024 (♉).

Be mindful that in most scenarios, an exact “birth time” for the entity in question could not be determined, and thus the exact time was left blank. In many cases, I was unable to determine where these entities were founded, either, leaving “place of birth” a questionable matter, as well. In most cases, given that this is “mundane” astrology, it likely isn’t too important. The symbols in parentheses represent an entity’s sun sign and nothing more. Sun signs, while significant, are a limited window on the natal chart.

In the future, I do want to take a crack at interpreting some of these charts, and generating more as I dig more into the history of the internet. I’m trying to learn more and more about Hellenistic astrology specifically, too, mostly of the Chris Brennan variety, but we’ll see if that proves fruitful. I’m a notoriously slow learner when it comes to fiddly subjects like that.

Perhaps you’re wondering why someone as chaos-influenced as myself is meddling with astrology. Maybe you’ve heard that many chaos magicians consider it (close to) worthless, or that it’s discouraged in popular chaos magic textbooks. Peter Carroll even says as much in Liber Null and Psychonaut, encouraging neophytes to pick up most any system of divination but that. I obviously disagree, or this page would not exist. I find Carroll’s perspective limiting given astrology’s long history. That, and, well, my own chart (which I won’t share) suggests certain things that panned out rather swimmingly…