Steampunk

What do you do when you are promised no future beyond the next Steve Jobs keynote address or summer blockbuster movie? What do you do when your present consists of going to work, paying the bills, and trying to make ends meet? Our society would have you put your head down, work a little longer, try a little harder, and maybe order that 50-inch wide screen TV from Amazon.com.

The EULA rebellion. The fact that you're forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you're just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.  

The advent of cheap personal computers spawned a society of programmers and hackers who write computer programs for their own use and distribute the source code, the program's core instructions, for free to anyone that's interested. Over time, these hackers have coalesced into groups and organizations that are capable of rivaling the skill and ability of huge corporations when it comes to the production of computer programs and particularly computer operating systems.

In a lot of ways I see steampunk and the aesthetic as part of a reaction to the current state of affairs. Not in terms of politics yadda yadda, but in the sense that it seems to come from a desire to regain some of the satisfaction and catharsis of dealing without something complex and real. In technology especially, with the advent of touch screen, "no tactility" apparatus, but I think it goes further into the overall lack of sensation that mainstream society offers. The lack of hardware creativity in the general population, and the lack of any real visceral experiences to be had in day to day life, I think is a huge part of Steampunk's attraction. Other types of creativity have their appeal, but nothing that can sit on your mantle, nothing that can clog up your living space and make your home dirty. Editing an anime music video can only sate your creativity so much, when compared to putting on some steel toe boots and soldering together a mad gyrocopter with a cannon strapped to the side.It's all part of the reaction to the simplicity and ease of living we, as a species, have been working towards for years. Fight Club for sci-fi geeks.I'd love to see a cultural movement defined by activity and the things it stands for rather than one defined by protesting the things it's against and demanding that others do something about them.

What I'm really interested in is the Victorian enthusiastic amateur inventor/scientist part. The way I see it, most of the worlds problems - poverty, hunger climate change etc.- will never be effectively addressed by a top down, high tech research and loads of investment capital approach. Rather, I imagine that any progress that will have any real effect will have to be of the sort that a self educated person can make in their garage

There's been a lot of debate about weather or not all the Steampunk case mods etc. are legitimate as they don't actually use steam, aren't real Babbage engines or whatever and I think that's pretty legitimate although it also misses the point. Which is that steampunk is really an art movement. It doesn't really have any cultural agenda such as the original punk movement did and it's certainly not interested with making steam age technology "useful"

To expand a bit on #5: More so than “expecting Star Trek and [getting] Blade Runner“, we were all expecting to be Da Vinci or Thomas Edison and instead we get DRM wars and corporate-owned patents. (See also: this article about a man whose bio lab equipment was confiscated from his basement.) There’s plenty to love about the steampunk aesthetic (if that’s your forte) but there’s even more to love about its DIY ethos. It’s emblematic of a time when anyone could tinker and invent (for the betterment of mankind, or for worse), when anyone could be master of their destiny, and we are all one clockwork automata run amok away from adventure.

In a third-floor loft where programmers build Internet start-ups, Mackenzie Cowell is talking about the tools he and like-minded young colleagues are using to fuel what they hope will be the next big thing in biology. The list includes a cut-up Charlie Card, ingredients bought on eBay to make a kind of scientific Jell-O, and a refrigerator, just scored on Craigslist.com, that chills to 80 degrees below zero.Cowell is part of an effort called DIYbio — short for do-it-yourself biology — that aims to move science into the hands of hobbyists. It is starting by holding sessions where amateurs extract DNA, and attempt genetic fingerprinting using common household items and the kitchen sink.

It shatters that clinical image.

What Cowell and crew hope to achieve is a democratization of science that could propel the field of biology into the mainstream, much as computer hackers fueled computer development a generation ago.

In the introduction to The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus states that ''as we try to understand the past we try to understand ourselves in relation to the past'' (xix). Marcus's words, as much as they provide a rationale for historiography in general, are particularly pertinent to the fascination that the Victorian period has for contemporary audiences. We recognize ourselves in a play of similarity and difference, or, as Marcus puts it, the Victorians' ''otherness connects them to us,'' though, he cautions, ''connection is nevertheless not identity.'' While Marcus allows for historical breakthroughs, that is, for moments of radical change, he still considers Victorianism the first half of the paradigmatic bracket within which we still operate at the present time

he insists that the transfer of culturally marginal materials into the mainstream takes place the same way today as it did a hundred years ago--''split off from what might have been expected to accompany [them]--impulses of a social revolutionary kind'' (154). In other words, what we share with the Victorians are essentially the same social, economic, and political structures, as well as a sense that cultural transformation can or will take place without affecting them in any direct or immediate way

what makes the Victorian past so fascinating is its unique historical ability to reflect the present moment