Steampunk as a literary form is, for the most part, just a form of the alternate-history novel with elements of science fiction and fantasy thrown in. Though interesting in many ways, it’s not particularly sociologically significant (by itself) – but there is something interesting to be said about it’s sudden and more recent popularity as inspiration for decor.
The resulting decor is deliberately anachronistic, not for sale anywhere and generally done painstakingly by hand by the fans of it. When I say deliberately anachronistic I mean it, fans take the crucial elements of steam era technology (copper and brass cogwheels and sprockets) and mould them into modern technological devices in such a way as to present the appearance that they are functional parts of these devices.
While the literary form may have inspired the idea, it’s certainly more than that.
So why is geek culture suddenly embracing a design style so radically different from what we more commonly expect ? What happen to the LED-string lights and cathode-tubes and plasma-balls we all love and why are we now decorating with cogwheels and mechanicals ? What most geeks do for a living shuns “mechanical” as generally being the worst part of things – it’s the gears and sprockets in the computer (usually in things like fans and hard drive motors) that break. Yet … this design seems to hype up something we are supposed to dislike ?
I think I have an idea why though. Steampunk design takes it’s cues not from the technology of the Victorian age but from the aesthetic designs for technology that were prevalent in that age – and there is a crucial difference between the aesthetic design that Victorian era companies embraced and that prevalent today.
Victorian technology took pride in making as much of the workings of the device visible as possible, as many moving parts in plain sight as could be there. The casings were usually made of glass, and the sprockets and gears kept polished and shined as they were meant to be observed.
The reason was that the Victorians took pride not just in what the device did, but in the intricate workings that allowed it to do so. The designers fed a market filled with curiosity.
By contrast – modern culture has developed a kind of hatred of curiosity. People not only aren’t curious, they not only don’t care about how things work – they insist that their ignorance is a kind of right. Designers of modern technology hide as much of the workings of their product as possible, hide the intricacies – because people get upset by them. People care only about what the device does, they do not want to know or think about how it does so and confronting them with the knowledge upset them.
Geeks have always been a counter-culture to this aspect. Geeks want to know how it works, they are curious explorers by nature. We open our stuff up to see how it fits together, we are the drivers of the free and open-source movement because we want to be able to see how our software works.
In short – geeks have embraced steampunk design out of a deepseated nostalgia for an era when this curiosity was not frowned upon, deemed antisocial or weird, but in fact shared by so many that every device was designed to meet it.
Like all forms of nostalgia this is probably a pretty romanticized view (and certainly a mostly unconscious one). I doubt the average Victorian coalminer gave a damn how a clock worked, but the Victorian gentleman who owned the clock certainly did – that is why all the clocks had casings made of glass rather than wood or sheet-metal. Today we all own clocks – but only a small group of us still care about how a clock works. We are the geeks, the curious ones – the seekers of knowledge. Steampunk-design is a representation of that desire to see behind the veil – a nostalgia for an age when the veil wasn’t there, and more importantly was unwanted rather than desired.
