What Smuggling Teaches Us About AI and Knowledge Creators
Centralized Power and the Fragility of Intellectual Freedom
We saw in Part Two the themes of intellectual gate-keeping and the tactic of silencing voices or groups outside of established centralized power. Returning now to our present day predicament in the knowledge economy and ‘Age of AI’, the potential dangers of centralized power, control, and ownership over human thought is disquieting.
We can see this as recently as the writing of these articles in December 2025: while individual states have attempted to place guardrails on AI, President Trump and the AI industry have pushed back, banning states from doing so.(1) History suggests that centralized authority rarely protects intellectual freedom on its own.
However, history also shows us that decentralized efforts have often been far more effective. The successful preservation of intellectual thought by both Christian monks (465–481 CE) and Buddhist scholars (550–573 CE) was achieved outside the centralized religious and political powers of their time. This is an important distinction. Their efforts were not coordinated in the visible or organized ways of groups like the Origenists or the Knights Templar—whose collective visibility ultimately placed targets on their backs. Instead, these preservation efforts were born out of necessity. And taken together, they succeeded in transmitting knowledge through intellectually hostile environments.
Notably, these protectors of knowledge did not have a single loud, defiant voice like Socrates or William Wallace. Yet they were coordinated nonetheless—if unknowingly—much like the thetes of Athens. The inherent value of the thetes as a collective labor force won them not only individual political rights but also the eventual restoration of democracy from the abusive control of the wealthy and powerful.
AI’s greatest vulnerability is also its greatest strength: it requires constant ingestion. Without new data, it stagnates. This creates a paradox. Refusing to engage with AI risks invisibility; feeding it indiscriminately accelerates dispossession.
This is where an unexpected historical pattern becomes useful: black markets.
Black Markets as Adaptive Resistance
Pluto’s most recent habitation in Leo occurred from 1937–1956, while we were still firmly within an Age of Earth. The Earth element emphasizes materiality—consumable goods, monetary value, physical structures, and foundational systems. As such, we see a familiar Leonine emphasis on centralization, top-down authority, and the will of an individual or institution affecting large populations, but filtered through the domain of material goods rather than ideas.
This period coincides, of course, with World War II and the economic rehabilitation that followed during the early Cold War. It is also when the term black market became widely popularized, emerging at the end of Prohibition and extending into WWII just as Pluto shifted from Cancer into Leo.(2)
Black markets are underground systems or parallel economies in which goods and services are exchanged without government oversight. They emerge when formal systems fail to meet real needs—especially under conditions of scarcity, overregulation, or monopolization. Importantly, while black markets redistribute goods, they do not do so equitably. They often enriched the ruthless while exploiting the vulnerable.(3)
Prohibition itself stands as an extraordinary experiment in social control and overregulation.(4) When Prohibition was enacted during Pluto’s stay in Cancer, it radically transformed socialization—previously a largely home-based activity. Home dinner parties (a distinctly Cancerian phenomenon) became essential spaces for both socializing and alcohol consumption. At the same time, Prohibition stimulated new forms of social interaction outside the home, including increased interracial and intersex socializing. It also catalyzed the formation of the first nationwide criminal syndicates and organized mob families.(5)
These highly organized underground networks not only quenched the public’s thirst but were perfectly positioned to expand from alcohol bootlegging into the broader trade of contraband goods as WWII approached. The shift from hidden “watering holes” (Cancer) or speakeasies to expansive clandestine trading networks with unscrupulous entrepreneurs (Leo) mirrors Pluto’s axial transition in 1937.
Black markets were by no means limited to the United States. In Poland, they thrived under the abusive authority of German occupation.(6) In Japan, black markets rapidly emerged after WWII due to supply-chain collapse and weakened government oversight, often operating amid rubble and destroyed infrastructure.(7)
Across contexts, motivations for participation overlapped. For some, black-market activity was an economic necessity. For others, it represented an Aquarian act of resistance,(8) rooted in the belief that rationed goods were not truly scarce enough to justify state control. At the same time, sellers were often driven by individual entrepreneurial motives and profit.(9) Together, these dynamics reflect the Age of Earth’s focus on material goods while still expressing the Leo–Aquarius tension between individual agency and collective dissent under centralized authority.
Black markets themselves are not unique to this period. Terms such as smuggling, trafficking, rum-running, and bootlegging attest to the historical persistence of illicit economies across cultures and eras. This pattern becomes particularly instructive when we look at another pivotal moment along the same Pluto axis: the founding of the United States.
Beginning in the 1760s, while Pluto was in Capricorn during an Age of Fire, illicit trade flourished in the American colonies. As Peter Andreas explains in Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, “The opportunities and incentives to smuggle were enormous. Ambitious British trade restrictions clashed with the limits of actual enforcement, a long and minimally monitored coastline, and fierce local resistance.”(10)
Molasses smuggling to produce rum became so central that John Adams later remarked, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence.”(11)
Illicit trade, paradoxically, enabled legal commerce to expand by allowing colonists to afford British goods they otherwise could not. Thus, with Pluto in Capricorn (Earth) during an Age of Fire, smuggling material goods helped create a free-ranging consumer society.(12) This dynamic shifted once Pluto entered Aquarius in 1777.
The conventional narrative frames the American Revolution as a protest against taxation. More precisely, it was a revolt against the enforcement of trade laws that threatened a deeply entrenched smuggling culture. After the Seven Years’ War, Britain sought to recover debt by cracking down on illicit trade—introducing unrestricted search warrants, military admiralty courts, and the militarization of customs enforcement. (The parallels to contemporary events are striking, though beyond this article’s scope.)
When war broke out, colonial success depended in part on the very smuggling networks Britain had tried to dismantle. Independence then created a dilemma: how does a nation founded through the evasion of trade law regulate trade under its own authority?
The solution required an ideological shift. Smuggling could no longer be framed as patriotic resistance to imperial control; it had to be reframed as a self-serving or neutral activity—an expression of the Leo–Aquarius dynamic. The United States increasingly exported this paradigm abroad, positioning itself as a neutral trading intermediary during Pluto’s transit through Aquarius.
That approach changed again after Pluto entered Pisces in 1797 and the Age of Fire gave way to the Age of Earth in 1802. Under Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, efforts turned toward regulating material goods domestically through international relationships—bringing the focus back to Earth-bound control.
From Illicit Trade to Cognitive Scarcity
The same Leo–Aquarius axis that shaped black markets during WWII in an Age of Earth and smuggling cultures before the American Revolution in an Age of Fire is activated once again today—but now within an Age of Air.
While the prior focus of these trafficking efforts was freedom (Fire) from the rationale (Aquarius), overstep (Leo), and greed of a centralized government over money and material goods (Earth), we now find ourselves struggling with the greed of data-hungry machines, the overstep of tech companies, and our own cognitive intoxication—the belief that we have created knowledge when we have merely acquired it.
Just as material scarcity once produced illicit economies, cognitive scarcity now shapes how knowledge circulates. This struggle is borderless and ideological, involving a seemingly neutral and non-human third party: AI.
Yet, in this underhanded exchange, the ones we are ultimately cheating are ourselves.
In the final installment of this series, we’ll explore where this trajectory may lead—and what kinds of responses history suggests are still possible.
Footnotes:
References:
2025 United States government online resource removals. (2025, December 7). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_government_online_resource_removals
Andreas, P. (2013). Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America.Oxford University Press.
Archimedes’ screw. (2025, December 8). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw
Brennan, C. & Coppock, A. (Hosts). (2025, December 1). Monthly Astrology Forecasts (No. 514) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Astrology Podcast. https://theastrologypodcast.com/2025/12/01/december-astrology-forecast-2025
Chivers, T. (2025, December 12). Trump signs executive order banning states from regulating AI. Semafor. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/12/2025/trump-signs-executive-order-banning-states-from-regulating-ai
Christopher, J. (2021, November 28). Pluto Ingress: Timeline. Cyclical Dynamics. https://cyclicaldynamics.com/pluto-ingress-timeline/
Evans, B., & Pine, L. (2024). Introduction: Black Markets During the Second World War. Global Food History, 10(3), 267–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2024.2400023
Fiveable Content Team. (September 2025). “World history: 1400 to present review—black markets.” Fiveable. Retrieved November 25, 2025. https://fiveable.me/key-terms/world-history-since-1400/black-markets
Goodwin, M. (2006). Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts. Cambridge University Press.
Grasse, R. (2023). Drawing Down the Fire of the Gods - Reflections on the Leo/Aquarius Axis. Astrodienst. https://www.astro.com/astrology/in_rgleoaqu_e.htm
Hatsuda, K. and Sakasai, A. (2016) The Black Market as City: New Research on Alternative Urban Space in Occupied Japan (1945-52) [Online detail summary]. Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities. https://arc-hum.princeton.edu/black-market
Kelly, W. E. (2021). Black Market in the 1940’s. EBSCO Knowledge Advantage, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/black-market-1940s#full-article
Kurbalija, J. (2025, January 21). Tech at Trump’s inauguration: Visible presence, loud absence. Diplo. https://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/tech-at-trumps-inauguration-visible-presence-and-loud-absence/#:~:text=The%20imagery%20was%20striking:%20at,tech%20power%20under%20Trump%202.0
Moss, A. (2025, September 7). Anthropic’s $1.5 billion speeding ticket.Copyright Lately. https://copyrightlately.com/anthropic-settlement/
Mystic Medusa, “Jupiter-Saturn Conjunctions from 2092 BC - 2100 CE.” https://mysticmedusa.com/jupiter-saturn-conjunction-dates/
Okrent, D. (2010). Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner.
Origenist crises. (2025, September 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origenist_crises
Oxford English Dictionary. (2011). Black Market. In oed.com Retrieved December 9, 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/black-market_n
Peloponnesian War. (2025, December 9). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War
The Public Interest Corpus. (2025). Principles and Goals.https://publicinterestcorpus.org/principles-and-goals/
Tarnas, R. (2006). Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Plume.
United States Mint. (2025, November 12). United States Mint Hosts Historic Ceremonial Strike for Final Production of the Circulating One-Cent Coin [Press release]. https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/united-states-mint-hosts-historic-ceremonial-strike-for-final-production-of-the-circulating-one-cent-coin
