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Astrology expresses complex ideas about personality, life cycles, and relationship patterns through the shorthand of the planets and zodiac symbols. And that shorthand works well online, where symbols and shorthand are often baked into communication.

Now, Silicon Valley tapped into millennial ennui – or, depending on your amount of cynicism, self-obsession – by taking astrology into the app age.

For Altman, the skill of pattern recognition she developed through astrology is the same skill she uses when analyzing a candlestick chart in technical analysis.

“Both technical analysis and astrology use the same mechanism where you’re looking at past cycles to predict the future,” Altman says. “One simply has a lot of pop culture with magic around... See more

In the meme economy, the market performance of a stock or cryptocurrency is less about forecasting business revenue than it is about gauging a traded asset’s “memeability.” This user-generated, virality-based investment strategy can best be explained by René Girard’s mimetic theory of desire, which argues that “human desire is not an autonomous pro... See more

It might be that Millennials are more comfortable living in the borderlands between skepticism and belief because they’ve spent so much of their lives online, in another space that is real and unreal at the same time. That so many people find astrology meaningful is a reminder that something doesn’t have to be real to feel true. Don’t we find truth... See more