The User's Guide to Steampunk by Bruce Sterling

[XemaSab]

People like steampunk for two good reasons. First, it’s a great opportunity to dress up in a cool, weird way that baffles the straights. Second, steampunk set design looks great.The Industrial Revolution has grown old. So machines that Romantics considered satanic now look romantic.

If you like to play dress-up, good for you. You're probably young, and, being young, you have some identity issues. So while pretending to be a fireman, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or whatever your parents want you to be, you should be sure to try on a few identities that are totally impossible.Steampunk will help you, because you cannot, ever, be an authentic denizen of the 19th century. You will meet interesting people your own age who share your vague discontent with today's status quo. Clutch them to your velvet-frilled bosom, because you will learn more from them than you ever will from your teachers.

Stretching your self-definition will help you when, in later life, you are forced to become something your parents could not even imagine. This is a likely fate for you.Your parents were born in the 20th century. Soon their 20th century world will seem even deader, weirder and more remote than the 19th. The 19th-century world was crude, limited and clanky, but the 20th-century world is calamitously unsustainable. I would advise you to get used to thinking of all your tools, toys and possessions as weird oddities destined for the recycle bin. Imagine starting all over with radically different material surroundings. Get used to that idea.

If you are European, you may further realize that you are surrounded by an ever-growing European "museum economy" that sells your heritage as a "heritage industry." Familiarity with steampunk will certainly help you here. The heritage industry does not sell heritage, because heritage is inherently unsellable. Instead, it sells the tourist-friendly, simplified, Photoshopped, price-tagged, Disneyized version of heritage. Steampunk is great at mocking and parodizing this activity. That's what makes steampunk a thoroughly contemporary act.

http://gogbot.nl.vedor.com/thema/

[xchrom]

1. i love steampunk

and have a whole subset of my wardrobe devoted to it.

[XemaSab]

4. It is my dearest hope

to someday have a worthy space for displaying my curiosities. :)

[xchrom]

5. ah but it must be of the sturdiest quality -- as well aesthetically perfect. nt

[phantom power]

2. If I lived in the 17th century, I would never have to wash my dad's minivan!

[htuttle]

6. Yeah, but you know what you'd have to do instead?

Hint: It involves horses and a shovel...

[phantom power]

7. No doubt!

I took that from an old SNL series of skits that spoofed the teen goth scene from the 90s. The bit about dissatisfaction with the present made me think of it. Steampunk seems like it might be the goth scene for the early 21st.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[create.peace]

3. thank you for an explanation!

my son has it listed as his religion on facebook!