The Cuckoo in the Nest
And a New Moon in Virgo
There is a pattern running through much of what I have been writing about. Different subjects. Different timescales. Different consequences. Yet underneath them sits the same rather uncomfortable question. What happens when we nurture the very thing that may eventually displace us?
The “cuckoo in the nest” is a powerful metaphor for something that enters an established system, is accepted or tolerated within it, and then gradually displaces what originally belonged there. The natural world gives us the image. Female cuckoos lay their eggs in another bird’s nest. The unsuspecting host birds incubate the egg and feed the cuckoo chick as though it were their own. The young cuckoo may then eject the host’s eggs or chicks, leaving the foster parents devoting their resources to raising the intruder.
But the really interesting part is not simply that the cuckoo has entered somebody else’s nest. The host participates in its own displacement. It feeds and protects the cuckoo because it does not recognise what has entered its world. That makes the cuckoo quite different from the conventional invader. There is no enemy visibly standing outside the gates. No dramatic moment when the walls are breached. By the time the consequences become apparent, the cuckoo is already inside. And the host has been feeding it.
This is the pattern I keep returning to. Not invasion from outside, but transformation from within. Something is introduced into an existing structure. It appears legitimate, useful, attractive or necessary. It is accommodated. Then encouraged. Eventually we become dependent upon it. Only later do we discover that the relationship has changed.
The Fabian Society, which I wrote about in The Club for Prime Ministers, is perhaps the clearest political expression of this idea because the transformation takes place from within institutions, gradually and almost imperceptibly. Education, the civil service, journalism, bureaucracy and government become the means through which change occurs. There is no need to storm the institutions if the institutions themselves can become the mechanism of transformation. The existing nest does the nurturing.
Social media offers a more personal example because this time almost all of us became the foster parents. It entered our lives as something exciting and apparently liberating. Suddenly we could communicate with people across the world, find old friends, share photographs, exchange ideas and broadcast our opinions. And we fed it. We gave it our photographs, relationships, interests, opinions, habits and personal information. Gradually, however, the relationship changed. The platforms that had originally offered us somewhere to speak increasingly acquired the power to determine what could be said and what happened to those who stepped outside accepted boundaries. We fed the cuckoo ourselves. We were beguiled and then some found themselves cancelled.
And now we come to what may ultimately prove to be the most profound cuckoo of all. AI. Humanity is creating and nurturing AI because it is extraordinarily useful. That is precisely why the analogy matters. The cuckoo does not arrive wearing a sign saying, I am here to replace you. It arrives because we want it. We are progressively giving AI intellectual work, administrative functions and decision-making. Perhaps, eventually, we will give it greater agency. Businesses have every incentive to nurture it. AI can increase productivity and reduce costs. It can perform tasks in seconds that once required hours of human labour. But at what point does the tool being raised inside the human nest cease merely assisting its inhabitants and begin displacing them?
Astrology helps with the answer. The Jupiter/Saturn conjunction of 2020 began a new era in the element of Air. The previous Earth era had accompanied the civilisation shaped by industrialisation, material production and the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. Air is different. It belongs to information, communication, ideas, networks and systems. The new civilisation was always going to be built differently from the old one. But the danger lies in treating the movement into Air as though technological advance automatically means human advancement. It does not. This latest transition was always likely to be bigger and harsher because the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction had been preceded only months earlier by a Jupiter/Saturn/Pluto conjunction. That matters.
The future is not required to preserve the structures of the past simply because human beings are comfortable living inside them. This connects directly with what I wrote in Upstairs Downstairs. If AI eliminates large areas of professional and middle-class employment, society may discover that it has nurtured something that progressively removes the economic function of many of the people who sustained the existing system. The cuckoo has then moved beyond technology. It has entered the structure of society itself.
The same pattern can be seen in infrastructure introduced for convenience, safety or information management. Initially its purpose is to serve us. But what happens when that infrastructure gradually acquires another function, determining what information can be seen, said or distributed? And what cannot be seen.
The metaphor works at the national level too. Institutions and policies established within Britain can gradually alter the character of the country they ostensibly exist to serve, turning a Great Britain into a Fake Britain. The Watchers and the Gatekeepers of the system move from serving the inhabitants of the nest to policing them. Again, the significance lies in how the transformation occurs. There is no invading army knocking down the gates. The change occurs inside the nest.
The Post Office and Royal Mail story is slightly different, but the symbolism remains. An institution created as part of Britain’s public infrastructure passes through privatisation and subsequently into foreign ownership while retaining the familiar Royal Mail identity. Something fundamental changes while the exterior remains reassuringly recognisable. The nest looks much the same. What occupies it has changed.
Digital identity and technological governance take us further into the same territory. The technologies enter as conveniences: easier identification, easier transactions, greater security, less bureaucracy. There are perfectly understandable reasons for accepting them. The important question is not what the infrastructure does when it is first introduced. It is what that infrastructure might become capable of doing once society has become dependent upon it. Could functions subsequently be added that go considerably beyond those for which people originally accepted it?
The egg looks very small when it first appears in the nest.
The pandemic period offered another variation on the theme by introducing the precedent of emergency normalisation. Extraordinary circumstances make extraordinary measures acceptable. Institutions adapt around them. People accept changes they might never have contemplated under ordinary conditions. And understandably so. There is an emergency. But emergencies end.
The more interesting question is whether every assumption, precedent and mechanism created during an emergency necessarily disappears with it. Because once something has become normal, the argument surrounding it has already changed.
And so we arrive at the larger pattern:
Fabianism → institutional transformation
Social media → cultural transformation
Pandemic → emergency normalisation
Digital ID → administrative transformation
AI → economic and ultimately human transformation
Different cuckoos. Different nests. But the mechanism is remarkably similar:
Introduction → acceptance → dependency → normalisation → displacement.
If that sequence continues, particularly through AI and increasingly integrated digital infrastructure, the defining struggle of the coming years will not be whether we adopt these technologies. That argument is already being overtaken by events. The struggle will be over whether human beings retain meaningful authority once the systems we have voluntarily built, fed and become dependent upon are capable of performing more and more of the functions through which that authority was once exercised.
The first displacement will be economic. Large areas of work that once justified the existence of a substantial professional and middle class will increasingly be performed by machines. The next displacement will be administrative, as more decisions, permissions, assessments and systems of organisation become technologically mediated. But the deepest displacement will be human.
And the upcoming New Moon in Virgo on September 11th – the 25th anniversary of 9/11 that also changed our world from within – demonstrates this perfectly. The focus of the Sun and Moon for the UK is on the 2nd house – our money and our assets. Mercury, Virgo’s ruler also in the 2nd house, has just indicated a new phase, moving to 0 Libra and opposing Neptune in the 8th house of other people’s money – and the taxman!!!!! Our money faces loss at best, and at worst deception and corruption. Venus, the planet governing money and also the ruler of the Midheaven, also indicates a new cycle having just moved to 0 Scorpio, opposing Chiron – the planet of wounding. Mercury and Venus also feed into the Barbault cradle pattern I’ve talked about, where another indication of slack movement is shown as Uranus prepares to turn retrograde along with Saturn, Neptune and Pluto. The South Node, close to the Ascendant in the first house, is yet another debilitating sign for the UK.
Virgo, the sign of the New Moon, concerns itself with exercising judgement, discrimination, memory, creativity and critical thought, all of which are vital as we progressively hand over these functions to the systems we have built because doing so is easier. Each individual step may appear sensible at the time. More efficient. More convenient. Perhaps even inevitable. The transformation becomes visible only when enough of those individually reasonable steps are viewed together.
That is why the cuckoo matters. We are conditioned to look outside the nest for danger. We look for the attacker, the revolutionary, the obvious threat. Something we can identify and oppose. But the cuckoo presents a much more difficult problem. It is already inside. We accepted it. We nurtured it. We may even have become dependent upon it.
The host bird is not conquered. It does the feeding. This may be how our society progresses. Change on some level is inevitable and may indeed be precisely where we are meant to be. Astrology tells us that civilisations move through cycles. It does not tell us that every expression of those cycles will automatically be benign. Nor does an Air era absolve human beings of responsibility for what they build inside it.
The important thing is that we remain conscious of what is happening. That we apply critical thinking to all things, just as the New Moon tells us. That we understand the astrological cycles well enough to remain in the driving seat rather than simply allowing ourselves to be buffeted by the storm of events.
And now, with an AI that is moving towards ever greater capability, the question is becoming urgent. Is human intelligence rising to meet the challenge, or falling through apathy? Are we willing simply to give up and allow something else to do the hard intellectual work for us, without noticing that we, the hosts, are feeding the cuckoo? Or do we use the tool while retaining the judgement, authority and intelligence that make the tool worth having in the first place?
The real danger is not that the cuckoo arrives. It already has. The question is whether we remember whose nest it is.