The Past and Present of the Future

The Phoenix takes a look at Steampunk:

There is no typical Steampunk. Its practitioners are anyone and everyone: European re-enactors, middle-aged steam enthusiasts, carpenters, illustrators, sculptors, urban clotheshorses. “I think steam engines are beautiful,” says Zachary Rukstela, a musician and industrial artist. “Steampunk was borne of the counter-culture,” Magpie Killjoy, a writer, editor, and self-described “professional ex-worker,” tells me. Libby Bulloff, an anachro tech-fetishist designer living in Indiana, has been attracted to “the tarnished decadence of Steampunk technology” for years. “I sort of see this as a big Venn diagram, with Steampunk as the box and a bunch of overlapping circles of interest,” adds von Slatt. While Steampunks — self-described or not — don’t always see eye to eye on their metaculture’s boundaries, they all have at least one crucial thing in common: a lasting, passionate fascination with Victoriana. The period roughly spans the length of Queen Victoria’s rule, when early scientific discoveries thrust society headlong into the Industrial Revolution, allowing part-time craftsmen who were captivated by the means and methods behind these inventions to advance breakthroughs of their own.

The gravitational center of Steampunk is a longing for a past that never was. It was a time when a computer could indeed run on steam, when dapper gentlemen with clean shirt cuffs and pocket watches could be mad scientists by night, and when an object’s uniqueness and aesthetics were just as important as its functioning guts. If you think of it as an exuberant amalgam of the modern with the 19th century, you begin to get the idea, but you’re barely dipping your toe into the ocean, because Steampunk isn’t merely a not-so-secret fringe culture any longer. It has developed a set of values that, for some, go deeper than a hobbyist’s nostalgia for an age they weren’t around to experience. The Steampunk ideology is in no way uniform — like the culture itself, it can be taken apart and put back together to suit its makers — but it seems to be ingrained in a combination of radical politics, an anti-corporate, do-it-completely-yourself ethic, and an acceptance that we are already living in the dystopian future we’ve been warned about.