One Saturday in March, my budgeting app suggested, “How about you eat in tonight?” On Sunday, my calorie-counting app (I know) told me to “remember to make room for those big-ticket items.” (I deleted it.) On Monday, my language-learning app said that my failure to practice Italian had “made it sad.”
And then, on Tuesday, this came in from Co–Star: “Get a plane ticket if you can and just go.”
Reader, I could not, but, boy, what chutzpah.
I first downloaded the Co–Star app in November 2017 at the suggestion of my most streetwear-literate, Bushwickian friend. The “first-ever A.I.-powered” astrology app, Co–Star promised “algorithmically-generated insights personalized to a degree unattainable elsewhere” into how the planets, moon, and one star’s day-to-day impact on earthly beings. I entered the requisite birth time and location information, added a few folks, and was instantly overwhelmed by all the information. It breaks down your natal chart and those of your friends, and also how compatible you two are in seven categories, from “Moods & Emotions” to “Senses of Responsibility.” It was beautiful. It was a lot. I closed it, and didn’t think about it again until March, when its “Your day at a glance” push notifications became a meme.
Sometimes ludicrous, occasionally rude, and often “spot on,” the readouts land like unsolicited advice from your frankest friend, the one who’s missing some social-grace chip. I turned my push notifications on, and, now, Co–Star is the only app that’s allowed to remind me of everything I’m not doing, and it’s allowed to be a salty prick about it, too. So much so that I spent the weeks writing this story grappling with its suggestions.
It’s Angela, Co–Star. Case closed. But as a person who follows directions, I follow the directions. I don’t say it out loud or anything; I think it at my face in my bedroom mirror, and, damn, if it doesn’t fill me with a momentary feeling of competence. The experience reminded me of a friend who recently told me about her ankle-surgery recovery. She’s made to run on a treadmill underwater while simultaneously watching herself run in real time on a television. Her brain, the theory goes, learns to believe what is actually happening—that is, that she was running without pain.
No clue what this has to do with my sun or what house my Mars is in, but right now? Angela and I are the boss.
For the last half-decade or so, astrology has seemed inescapable in certain circles of New York, even more so, I imagine, to the skeptics who couldn’t avoid it. Tech made it easy to distribute, and millennial dissatisfaction with more trenchant forms of spirituality made for many willing consumers (especially within queer communities). Co–Star and its push notifications cut through the noise, promising that every day was a new opportunity to become my better self—or at least better aligned with my rightful place in the cosmos. How’d it do that?
Mid-afternoon on a Friday in May, I met Banu Guler, C.E.O. and the most public facing of Co–Star’s three co-founders, at west~bourne, a slim vegetarian café on Sullivan Street. (The others are Anna Kopp and Ben Weitzman, chief product officer and chief technology officer, respectively.) She appeared at the counter in head-to-toe black, including her close-cropped hair, like something out of a Rick Owens dreamscape. Guler admitted that the restaurant is where she brings everyone—friends, investors, everyone. The food, the chaotic energy, and the left-of-center punctuation choices fit well alongside the person I had read about, a former punk who turned to tech. We both ordered the Sunset Grains (her recommendation), and she told me that everyone on the team referred to the dish as “vegan mush.” It was delicious.
Guler (31, Scorpio sun, Cancer rising, Leo moon) was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up with a “hodgepodge of science, and also woo”—by which she means “just minor witchcraft.” The practice of reading coffee grounds, courtesy of her Turkish-born mother, for example, and an early foray into palm reading. She can’t pinpoint when astrology entered her life, but for all intents and purposes, it was there all along.
A young adulthood full of punk shows and bike-messengering slowed down close to a decade ago, after she was clipped by a van at an intersection and hospitalized. A friend tipped her off that “that in the fashion world, there are tons of ex-punks,” and eventually she found a way in, and taught herself how to build Web sites and apps to help the industry incorporate tech product, working with Michael Kors, Ann Taylor, and more. It wasn’t such a big leap—the motivation to D.I.Y. one’s apps is not so far off from stick and pokes and zine assemblage, if you really think about it—but she was never connected to the merchandise. “I don’t know who wants to buy this stuff,” she said.
I already have an appointment to get fake eyelashes today, a treat that I had sworn off as a costly and vain expense during lean times. I had made the appointment months ago in anticipation of my birthday, which I’m aware makes me sound like a certain type of person. But, as you know, Co–Star, I’m a Taurus sun and moon, and I love luxury. What’s more luxurious than having delicate eyelashes placed on my own while I nap, so I wake up looking like a freak doll? This is my idea of a great date. Wow, less than a month into this experiment, and I’m already using it to justify my worst impulses.
The idea for Co–Star came from a place of gentle antagonism in 2015. While Guler was still at Michael Kors, a friend invited her to a baby shower, and she arrived bearing the gift of astrology: a book-length interpretation of the baby’s natal chart that she made by hand. The book was “dark” and “goth,” and Guler remembers thinking, “‘Yes, alienate everybody at this party, and just be like the weird, witchy friend from New York.’ You know? Like play to your strengths.”
Instead of feeling put off, the guests cooed over Guler’s work. “Where can I buy this?,” they asked. “You should sell them,” they said. She filed away the thought, and in the meantime took a job in product and design at VFiles, a social-media network for the streetwear set, where she met her future co-founders, Kopp and Weitzman. In Guler and Kopp’s world, it was normal to ask strangers their birth time and location, and, if the strangers were a particular kind of ignorant, encourage them to call their parents or the hospital in which they were born to verify. They brought Weitzman into the astrological fold, and he eventually acclimated to these frequent detours into the heavens.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 felt—for them, and so many others—like a personal turning point; they began working on the Co–Star app in 2017, and launched by the end of that year. And what timing. In 2018, the “mystical-services market” comprised a $2.2 billion industry, according to market research firm IBISWorld’s estimate. (Think palmistry, but also think aura photography.) Its rise—especially the astrology part—is well documented. Popular sites, from the Cut to Bustle, feature astrology columns. More apps have sprung up, like Sanctuary, which provides live readings on demand for a small fee, or the Pattern, which is also growing in popularity. Try scrolling through Twitter or Instagram without running face-first into an astrology meme.
Co–Star differentiates itself not only with its push notifications and its granular readings, but its aesthetic. Guler’s design sensibility was born out of show flyers—gray scale; human yet synthetic; natural objects morphed until they’re nearly unrecognizable, and maybe a little eerie or nightmarish. As branding for so many lifestyle companies converged on groovy fonts and shapes inspired by Matisse’s cutout period, Co–Star and its en dash stood out. Or, as Guler puts it, “Like this is so much cooler than an IKEA plate, you know?”
Seems like less of a horoscope and more of a by-product of being a human being, Co–Star, but I have been meaning to renew my library card anyway.
Co–Star’s edge is that it uses A.I. to organize avalanches of information on a daily basis. Where you once read what your sun sign was up to that month in the back of a Seventeen in the grocery-store checkout line, now your entire natal chart is at your fingertips. And where human astrologers were once the interpreters of the complex art of transits and houses, Co–Star spits it all out automatically. A human could never hope to keep in lockstep with an app’s quotidian hyper-personalized updates mapped to infinitesimal planetary movements.
To generate so many readouts—including the push notification—her team writes “snippets” of everything from a single word to entire sentences, and maps the snippets to the planetary movements. Et voilà. Your entire personhood. Sometimes the generator renders the text completely inscrutable, and it jumps from non sequitur to non sequitur. Sometimes the sentences read like a grammarian’s nightmare. (“Your tendency to cry in response to getting yelled at pressure you to see that if you want to wake up, you must continually leap, continually open, continually move forward despite fear.”) Sometimes they’re wildly beautiful. (“Put down the knife.”)
That’s all part of the grand design, sort of. “We have our homegrown thing that we call the ‘randomizer,’” after poet Anne Carson’s husband, Robert Currie, Guler said. Carson dedicated her book Red Doc> “to the randomizer,” and, as the poet told The New York Times Magazine in 2013, she called Currie such because he introduced bits of entropy into her work—sometimes by literally reorganizing the structure of her books with a random integer generator. “It saves you a lot of worry,” Carson said at the time. “You know, all that thinking.”
The team tests the output by, Guler said, “just dicking around by ourselves,” and checking for comprehension and whether it’s up to their standards. “Actually, Red Doc> is kind of unreadable, but the process behind it and the magic behind it, I think it’s hard to question,” Guler said. “So that’s what the randomizer does: chops and screws.”
But that’s my favorite and possibly only hobby, Co–Star!
Plenty of investors want a piece of the “mystical-services market,” and, in April, Co–Star raised more than $5 million in seed funding from respected firms like Maveron and 14W. Guler hasn’t personally experienced the horror stories often set in Silicon Valley boardrooms, in which ideas for and by women are met with blank stares from male V.C.s. For that, she thanks an early investor, Female Founders Fund, which exclusively works with start-ups owned by women. Its partners saved the team some time by screening potential Co–Star investors for mystic prejudice. And the popularity of the app makes the appeal of astrology obvious, Guler argued. “When you are growing really fast, and can coherently explain what you are doing and why it’s working, it speaks for itself,” she said. “If you just look at the numbers, something has to be wrong with you if your response is, ‘Well, I think astrology is fake.’ It’s like, ‘Good for you. I think Instagram is fake, so . . .’”
The company wouldn’t disclose how many active users it has, but, as of April, it had over 3 million registered users. It currently has 480,000 followers on Instagram, home to its own astrology memes rendered in black and white. Rave reviews on iTunes (4.9 stars) credit the app’s accuracy and the wealth of information it provides for free, but I’d venture that its voice is not a small piece of the puzzle. In the Co–Star office, they are constantly talking about how they want their own horoscopes to sound. “What is the version of this where you’re sitting on the couch with your friend?” Guler said. “You’re not like, ‘Oh my God, you’re really so pretty and amazing and smart.’ You say that stuff sometimes, but you are also like, ‘Dude, what the fuck were you thinking? Why did you sleep with that person?’” The resulting copy, with the help of the randomizer, is wry, hard-boiled, and aware. Naysayers still associate horoscopes with florid, mushy, woo-woo proclamations of old-school zodiac diviners, and Co–Star tries very hard to subvert those expectations.
In-app purchases are the only way Co–Star generates revenue for now. The app is free to download, but costs $2.99 to manually enter a person’s (or dog’s, or whatever’s) specific birth information, rather than connecting through the “add” feature, which automatically adds people on the app or in your contacts. They plan to use their recently raised bounty to hire engineers, mostly. “We are building our Android app right now,” she said. “If you go through our Instagram, at least 40 percent of the comments are, ‘Build Android and stop making memes,’” Guler joked, before lamenting that “there are no Android engineers in New York right now.” She dangles some fringe benefits of their office culture for potential candidates, saying that the team, which numbers fewer than 10 at present, does all the “corny stuff.” Book clubs. Getting their auras photographed. Group field trips to test brain-machine interface technology.
They’ve never marketed the app beyond a presence on social media, and they don’t plan to change that. The app sells itself by word of mouth. “There were a handful of times when the numbers shot up and we would just be like, ‘We have no idea what’s happening.’ And then we would get into maps and we’d be like, ‘Oh, it looks like we are going viral in, like, Asheville, North Carolina.’” Over 2018, the team watched users spread from the East Coast to the West Coast, and, now, “we are still slowly filling out the center.”
I received it while sitting next to my partner in the apartment we share, and recalled how sometime in the last few years, I had, without a doubt, put my eggs in his basket. Because the most straightforward interpretation of that recommendation in that category is untenable to me, I work my way beyond it. Maybe it’s more about spreading a general sort of love around. Maybe I should practice loving my pals with the same care and attention that I put into loving my partner. Maybe I should call my mother. Maybe I’ll just be a little more withholding toward my man today. I call my mother. This is the best thing this app has encouraged me to do.
Co–Star’s stronghold is also its birthplace. “Go to any of the sort of hip bars in Brooklyn right now,” she said. “You will invariably overhear groups of people downloading and talking about Co–Star.”
She’s overheard it herself. She could have overheard me at my local hip bar in Brooklyn, during any number of conversations with a friend about what exactly Co–Star is saying when it says, “Work at being spontaneous, effortless, and easy.” As a woman barely on the other side of my Saturn return (that’s 30 years old to you, my guy) and a coastal-city dweller, I fit the profile (Taurus sun and moon, Gemini rising).
My own approach to astrology, writ large, has been playfully curious, but it’s been pressing in from all sides of my urban, middle-class existence—online, at work, with friends from disparate pockets of life. It can be overwhelming, like an episode of Game of Thrones: You could get by without knowing some of the tertiary characters, but participating at any level could feel like studying for the big test. And, wow, some of this writing is bad, and, also, what is happening right now? Everyone you know is discussing it, and you enjoy talking to your friends, so you stick with it. And listen, the memes are great, even at 30 percent comprehension.
In this way, Co–Star is something of a godsend, and the worst offender. It’s social, because you can check whether the heavens have blessed your relationship to another person or not, and it’s also crib sheet that’s equally accessible to skeptics and diehards alike. You can waste an hour or two on your phone, sure, but the actual conversations tend to happen in real life, and you discuss the edicts sent down from the randomizer on high, and whether or not they align with your sense of self.
“Full disclosure: I am on Instagram eight times a day,” Guler said. “Like I check screen report, and I’m on it for 20 to 30 minutes a day. I’m not immune to it, but it makes you feel bad, and that’s not a central concern, I think, to how they build the app.” She then proposes the thesis of Co–Star, which we had been building toward over our vegan mush. “What if we instead rolled the question toward: How can we use technology to feel good and have stronger relationships, meaningful reflection, and figure out how to grow in amazing, sustainable, positive ways?
“I am falling into my woo,” she said, by way of apology.
Aw, come on.
I have no idea if astrology is “real,” and I don’t really care if it is or not, but conversations around rising signs and the houses tend to fall into similar beats. “That makes sense,” they all say, as we compare charts. No matter what my Co–Star says about me, they say, “That makes sense.” It can’t all make sense. Am I really this knowable? But like most people, I’m complex, and most every contradiction, every positive feeling, every negative mood finds a corresponding point in the revolving planets, moon, et. al. The app certainly does provide prompts and vocabulary for exploring why.
It’s possible to overdose on introspection, though, I learned in a month or so of taking it all more seriously than usual. Like so many frameworks for understanding this world, there’s a point in which it becomes more of a cage than an enabling constraint. As the “Your day at a glance” one-liners keep coming, it was easy to fall in a constant state of re-aligning with the cosmos. Another burden of self-improvement in a world preoccupied with becoming.
This article has been updated.
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