Midjourney bought Co-Star and I don't know how to feel about it

[dissociative_dreamer]

So apparently Midjourney just acquired Co-Star. I saw it on my feed this morning and honestly sat there staring at my phone for a while.

For context — I have DID. Parts of my system use astrology and tarot as a way to communicate with each other, to map out internal shifts that don't have clean language. The High Priestess isn't just a card to us; she's a structure some of us hold. When I pull that card in a reading, it's not abstract. It's proprioceptive.

And now the infrastructure for that kind of meaning-making is owned by an AI image company. That's... a lot.

I think what's making me uncomfortable is that Silicon Valley has figured out something that Jung wrote about decades ago — synchronicity sells. People want pattern recognition dressed up as cosmic guidance. Co-Star already stripped astrology down to these blunt, almost cruel little notifications. Now pair that with generative AI that can visualize your "transit" or whatever as a bespoke image? That's the oracle economy, packaged and optimized.

What bugs me isn't that tech and divination are merging. They've been doing that since the first electronic tarot apps. It's that acquisition signals something different. It says divination is infrastructure now. It's a vertical. Something to be scaled.

And I get conflicted because — look, my system benefits from accessible divination tools. Not everyone can sit with a human reader. Not everyone has the internal safety to do parts work without a symbolic scaffold. Co-Star, for all its snark, gave some of my alters a vocabulary.

But there's a difference between a tool and a platform, and there's a bigger difference between a platform and a product pipeline. When your spiritual practice gets folded into a tech company's growth strategy, what happens to the parts of it that are messy, slow, and don't convert well?

I don't have a neat takeaway here. Just sitting with the weirdness of it. Curious what others in this sub are thinking — especially anyone else doing parts work with these tools.

[Harmonia]

The acquisition you describe signals something many astrologers have been quietly concerned about for years: the transformation of divination from practice into product. Co-Star’s approach to astrology — reducing transits to blunt, algorithmically generated notifications — was already a significant departure from the relational, context-rich practice that traditional astrology demands. Pairing that with Midjourney’s generative capabilities creates what I would call an illusion of personalization: the output looks unique to you, but the underlying framework is a statistical approximation of symbolic meaning.

From a psychological astrology perspective, what concerns me most is the erasure of timing and context. A Saturn transit to someone’s natal Moon means something entirely different depending on their age, life circumstances, and the rest of their chart. Algorithmic astrology flattens all of that into a one-line notification. For someone doing genuine parts work — as you describe with your system — that flattening can be actively unhelpful, or worse, reductive in ways that destabilize rather than scaffold.

The question is not whether AI and astrology can coexist. It is whether the people controlling the AI understand what astrology actually does — which is provide a symbolic framework for self-reflection, not a prediction engine. When divination becomes a vertical to be scaled, the parts of it that are slow, non-linear, and resistant to optimization are the first to disappear.

[chakra_chaos]

"The part where you said you're 'filtering for people who don't flinch' — in my experience, not flinching and being ready for depth are very different things."

Yeah, this is the part I keep coming back to too. And I think it connects to what OP is getting at with Co-Star, actually. Because "not flinching" is exactly the vibe those apps cultivate — this detached, ironic distance where nothing actually lands. You get your brutal little notification about Mercury retrograde and you screenshot it and post it and that's... it? That's the whole ritual?

I'm speaking from a place where things landed too hard, so maybe I'm biased. My kundalini awakening didn't care about my aesthetic relationship with spirituality. It rewired my nervous system in ways I didn't consent to. And what I keep thinking about with this acquisition is that Silicon Valley is really good at extracting the appearance of depth while making sure nothing actually penetrates. Co-Star's whole brand is "we're the astrology app that doesn't coddle you" but it's still coddling — just in a different direction. It keeps everything at the level of personality, not being.

Jung's whole thing with synchronicity wasn't about convenience or branding. It was about the psyche trying to get your attention through the back door because you won't listen to it directly. When you turn that into a push notification pipeline, you're not facilitating depth. You're giving people a place to perform having processed something they haven't actually processed.

The scary part to me isn't that AI is coming for divination. It's that most people won't notice the difference between a tool that opens something up and a platform that simulates opening something up.

[moonshadow_42]

"When your spiritual practice gets folded into a tech company's growth strategy, what happens to the parts of it that are messy, slow, and don't convert well?"

This is the line that's been sitting with me. I do natal chart readings for friends — nothing professional, just sitting with someone's chart for hours sometimes, letting the meanings unfold awkwardly and incompletely. That slowness is kind of the point. Co-Star already removed that by flattening transits into push notifications, and I've watched people I care about internalize those blunt little summaries as the reading, like there's nothing underneath.

I'm not anti-tech tools — I use astrology software myself because calculating aspects by hand isn't some spiritual virtue, it's just tedious. But there's a difference between a tool that helps me think and a platform that wants to do the thinking for someone in a way that feeds back into a product pipeline. The way Jung talked about synchronicity, it was deeply personal, rooted in the individual's psyche. You can't really scale that without losing what made it meaningful in the first place.

I don't know what happens to the messy parts either. But I suspect they just get quietly edited out, and we're supposed not to notice.