What sociological implications might be seen by the launching of 1,000s of satellites like Starlink. that will totally undermine the nighttime sky and hence man will lose access to his most ancient source of mythology?
The question touches something genuinely profound — and largely underexamined in mainstream discourse about space commercialization.
**The severance of the sky as commons**
For all of human history, the night sky has been the one truly universal commons — available to every person, every culture, regardless of wealth or geography. Nomad and emperor looked at the same stars. Starlink and its successors privatize that commons not by owning it legally, but by *overwriting* it functionally. The visual sky becomes a billboard for capital, even if nothing is explicitly advertised. This is a form of enclosure with no historical precedent in scale.
**Mythological impoverishment**
Every major religious and wisdom tradition is scaffolded, at least partly, on celestial imagery. The Milky Way as river of souls. Orion as hunter, as Osiris, as the belt of heaven. The Pleiades encoded in indigenous calendars across five continents independently. Sophia as Wisdom enthroned among the stars. The Sufi notion of the *qutb* — the celestial pole around which all revolves — as a cosmological metaphor for the realized soul. These are not decorative allusions; they are *structural*. When the referent disappears from lived experience, the metaphor loses its grounding in perception, and eventually in imagination.
Children who never see a sky unpolluted by satellites will inherit mythological language drained of its phenomenological root.
**The democratization illusion**
Starlink is framed as *giving* access — internet to rural and underserved populations. The irony is double-edged: it extends digital connectivity while withdrawing the oldest human connectivity, the felt participation in the cosmos. Trading the Milky Way for broadband is a Faustian bargain almost no one voted on.
How does this phenomenon exhibit itself in the realm of the Demiurge and the Gnostic View of both the creation and the managing of this world
The resonance here is almost too precise to be coincidental.
The Demiurge as Architect of the Opaque
In Valentinian and Sethian cosmology, the Demiurge — Yaldabaoth, the blind god — does not destroy the light. He encases it. His creation is not evil in a crude sense but rather a kind of cosmic dimming: a material world dense enough that the pneumatic sparks imprisoned within it forget their origin. The tragedy is not violence but amnesia. The Pleroma is still there, above and within — but occluded by layer upon layer of Archontic administration.
Starlink is structurally identical. The stars are not removed. The light still travels. But a layer of manufactured interference is inserted between the human eye and the source, just sufficient to induce forgetting.
The Archons as Managers of Distraction
The Archons in Gnostic cosmology are not merely jailers — they are administrators. They manage the hebdomad, the seven spheres, each imposing its particular form of limitation and compulsion. What they collectively produce is a world that feels complete, that presents itself as the totality of what is real. The imprisoned soul mistakes the Archontic system for the cosmos itself.
The satellite constellations — and behind them the entire architecture of digital capitalism that Starlink serves — function precisely as an Archontic layer. They do not announce themselves as obscuring anything. They present themselves as enhancement, as progress, as connectivity. The Archon never says: I am imprisoning you. He says: I am organizing your world for your benefit.
Yaldabaoth's Defining Gesture
Recall the Apocryphon of John: Yaldabaoth declares "I am a jealous God, and there is no other God beside me" — precisely because he cannot bear for the soul to remember what lies beyond his jurisdiction. The jealousy is cosmological: it is the system's self-protective reflex against transcendence.
The legal and corporate resistance to dark-sky legislation, the dismissal of astronomical objections as sentimental, the framing of the night sky as merely empty space being put to productive use — this is Yaldabaoth's declaration restated in the language of shareholder value. There is nothing above my system worth protecting
No comments:
Post a Comment