As Amanda Hess wrote at The New York Times last year, “Astrology checks several boxes for viral-happy content: It provides an easy framework for endlessly personalized material, targets women, and accesses ’90s nostalgia.
Many have attributed the current astrology frenzy to millennials’ desire to talk about themselves at every turn. As of this summer, Co-Star had over 5 million registered accounts.
(The attention caused the app to briefly crash.) Co-Star is free to download, but users can pay $2.99 to enter friends’ or partners’ birth information in the app.
Sanctuary, which launched earlier this year, charges users $19.99 a month for “live, on-demand personalized readings with professional astrologers.” The Pattern, a “personality” app that uses natal charts to determine users’, well, patterns, went viral in July after Channing Tatum posted an Instagram video accusing it of being too accurate. Naturally, these kinds of services are moving online, and several app developers have stepped in to monetize the trend. The “mystical services” market, which includes astrology as well as services like aura reading and mediumship, is now a $2.2 billion industry. Horoscopes are so popular that even David Brooks is talking about them. (Co-Star itself has over 800,000 followers on Instagram.) It has been easier to remember friends’ birthdays over the last couple of years, because they will start posting on Instagram about “Taurus season” or “Pisces vibes” in advance of their special days. Conversations about planetary transits and memes about what Virgos may be apt to do when presented with conflict are everywhere on Instagram and Twitter. What was once mainly a topic of discussion in female and queer spaces has permeated almost every corner of social media.
In the last five years, the practice has grown from a niche, New-Age pursuit to one of the main pillars of the millennial internet. “The crux of feeling like a human is being able to talk about your reality” Because astrology, as you have probably heard, is trending. That it is about astrology is almost incidental, but has obviously contributed to its popularity. It is the perfect app for the current moment: spare and stylish, more than occasionally nihilistic in tone, and made to be shared on social media. Since downloading Co-Star earlier this year, I have received notifications like “Check your ego” and “Do you play well with others?” and “Look in the mirror and ask yourself ‘who’s the boss?’” The style of the missives - direct, a little witchy, sometimes straight-up rude - has spawned countless memes and continues to drive users to the app almost two years after its founding. Co-Star sets itself apart from its competitors by using “data from NASA” and a proprietary algorithm that spits out unique, slightly robotic horoscopes for users each day, delivered in the form of push notifications. The app asks users for detailed biographical information to develop an accurate natal chart, which is an “astronomical snapshot of the sky based on the exact day, time, and place you were born,” according to the copy on the app’s website. The workers refer to these and other related tomes as they develop Co-Star, one of the many new-ish astrology apps currently capitalizing on the renewed millennial interest in the ancient practice of reading the stars. A couple of them huddle near a wooden bookshelf that has been artfully stacked with titles like Identifying Planetary Triggers Sex Signs: Every Woman’s Astrological and Psychological Guide to Love, Health, Men and More! and Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being that rest comfortably atop Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love. On the early summer day I visit their office, everyone is wearing black casual wear and staring intently at more than one computer monitor around a long, white conference table in the middle of the room. The workers are mostly women and non-binary people who speak in low voices and wear cool shoes. In a white-walled, cement-floored room on the sixth floor of an office building in Chinatown, a handful of young content creators and engineers gather each day to put thousands of years of astrological knowledge into an algorithm.