Steampunk

I touched on this before, but there’s a lot of overlap between Steampunk culture and the whole post-zombie, sustainable development thing. Steampunk means different things to different people. Some are really into punk-Victorian fashion and clothing; others, the literature. The part of it that really appeals to me is the undercurrent about humanizing technology: Not gluing gears onto your laptop, but actually getting tech into your life that you’re on a more equal footing with.

Part of the old punk culture was this strong DIY ethic. It was about taking back your own culture. Make your own music, make your own clothes. Don’t just take what’s handed down to you from the authorities, the experts. Absolute “quality” is meaningless if it isn’t right for you.

That value underlies the Steampunk approach to technology. It encourages tinkering: Building, modifying, and learning. It believes that it’s better to have something that’s yours, that you can understand and work with, than to have something more efficient, more polished, more perfect. It’s better to have a grinding, wheezing engine that you can wrench on than an elegant, hermitically sealed black box.

We live in an age of black boxes. We build our lives around a wealth of amazing devices that we don’t entirely control. I have a cell phone that fits in my pocket and lets me talk to anyone in the country from anywhere in the country. If it breaks, I could no sooner make a new one than flap my arms and fly to the moon. Even if I had some grasp of its stupefying complexity, there’s the simple fact that some parts of it can only be made in billion-dollar fabrication plants. What we have here is a discontinuous technology stack. You can’t get there from here. It’s not like I could make a cell phone with hand tools, but it would be the size of a refrigerator. I can’t make one at all. It’s simply not possible. Do you have a microchip fabrication plant? Uh, no. Well, then you can’t make a cell phone.

This doesn’t keep me awake at night. The system we have for making and delivering cell phones is really very reliable. There are a lot of ingenious people out there with a powerful economic incentive to find some way to get one into my hot little mitts. Barring some kind of zombie apocalypse, I can count on being able to get a new one if I need it. But when I really stop and think about it, it does kinda give me pause.

I don’t see any Steampunks throwing out their cell phone and computers. What I see is a renewed interest in a level of tech that’s more comprehensible, more manageable, and maybe more sustainable. It’s not some neo-Luddite rejection of technology; quite the opposite. It’s a desire to embrace technology being frustrated by modern technology’s inaccessibility.

It’d be nice to be able to open the case and watch the gears and see how it works, but we’re way past that now. You have to go back a century or so, before everything went electronic. It’s not that mechanical devices are necessarily simple, but they’re observable in a way that electronics are not. If you can watch something work, maybe you can understand it. If you understand it, maybe you can maintain it. If you can maintain it, you’ve got that much more control over the technology in your world.

As an aside, that’s one of the things I like about biking. Bicycles may be made with really high-tech materials these days, but the mechanics of them are still pretty simple. I can look at it and see how it works. If it stops working, it’s pretty clear why. I may have to go to a shop and buy parts, but I can generally bolt them on myself.

This is also the driving motivation behind the open source software movement. It used to be that, as a business, you just bought software from IBM or Microsoft or someone. If anything went wrong with it, they might fix it if you gave them a big pile of money. Otherwise, you were stuck with it. For a business, that’s a scary kind of risk. So increasingly, they’re using open source tools and keeping someone on staff who knows how to go in under the hood. Maybe less efficient, maybe more expensive, maybe not. Either way, they have more control.

So, another feature of Victorian tech is the choice of materials: Metal, wood, fabric, leather, glass. They’re either renewable or reusable. Plants grow, animals reproduce, metal and glass can be melted down and re-formed. Plastic and silicone, not so much. As long as you have a blacksmith around, you won’t really run out of iron, and you won’t generate a lot of trash. You make things out of wood, eventually they break, and then you burn them and use the ashes to fertilize your garden.

Those materials can also be worked by hand. We have modern industrial equipment that makes it all better, faster, and cheaper - and we’re better off for it - but you don’t strictly need it. If you have your own sewing machine or power tools, you can work more quickly, with more precision, but you don’t really need them either. They’re not all that different in kind from their primitive ancestors. I’ve seen a machine shop that originally ran on water power. They took off the old belts, hooked up electric motors, and the machines kept on going. They could probably switch back if they had to.

Even industry in Victorian times was more localized. Power came from a neighboring stream, or a boiler in the basement, not from a electric plant half-way across the country. A factory might be dozens of people, but not thousands. Most of the stuff you owned was probably made within a hundred, maybe two hundred miles of you. Most of what you really needed to get through the day would have come from closer than that. It’s not like now, when half my furniture is from Sweden and all of my electronics came from the other side of the planet.

So if you go with this retro approach, you’ll end up with things that are made of locally available, sustainable materials; they’re powered by muscle, water, wind, or steam; and they can be built and maintained within a local community. So again we find ourselves converging with that sustainable development track and rubbing shoulders with the Make magazine posse: Do it yourself; use local products; design for reuse. Focus on what you really need, what is sufficient. If you’re going to make something decorative, make it yourself, make it meaningful, put part of yourself into it.

Victorian England, particularly London, is not an obvious role model for this. It conjures up images of antiquated morality and inhuman living and working conditions. It was the time when the culture of villages collided with the engines of modern industry. In some ways, it combined the worst aspects of both. Part of the Steampunk appeal is the idea of going back and striking that balance right: Combine modern social diversity and freedom with a more human scale of life. It’s not that much of a stretch. Britain did have a truly global empire: Even if many people clung to embarrassingly parochial attitudes, others embraced the possibilities of a global future. They may not have had all of the cool toys we do, but the way they thought about the world, the way the lived, is basically familiar in a way that is not true of people a century earlier.