Towards a Steampunk Lifestyle

“You want steampunk to be a novelty, a LOLcat, a meme. I want it to be my life. Which of us is going to fight harder for it?” –Dimitri Markotin
Steampunk Magazine #5

“We are a technological society. When we trifle, in our sly, Gothic, grave-robbing fashion, with archaic and eclipsed technologies, we are secretly preparing ourselves for the death of our own tech.” -Bruce Sterling

The User's Guide to Steampunk

The word “steampunk” initially described a subgenre of science fiction. Starting in 2004 and 2005 it was used to describe a bohemian art and lifestyle movement. The word of late seems to mainly refer to a costuming trend at various fan culture gatherings. This has started in about 2008 or 2007 at the earliest. The costumes themselves show their counter cultural origins strongly with features like corsets as a top layer (a gothic style) and the ubiquitous goggles (with origins in the Burning Man and industrial music scenes), but this fact is increasingly overlooked. There is nothing wrong with costuming and its associated pastimes but there is a great deal wrong with trying to push aside other, older, aspects of the movement and trying to pretend that steampunk is just fan culture as usual. It can never be that because fan culture largely ignored steampunk until a bunch of bohemians made it sexy.

Corresponding with the increasing popularity of steampunk as an aspect of fan culture, is the now almost exclusive use of the word "genre," to describe what steampunk is. The word "genre" does describe a small part of what steampunk is, but its excessive use is exclusionary. The function of the word "genre" in this context is to reimagine the entire steampunk movement as a uncontroversial, social acceptable, easily assessable variation on a hobby. It’s use is an attempt to scrub the movement of the more deviant sounding implications of words like "movement," “music scene,” “artistic scene,” and most of all "lifestyle."

Let us be clear; this blog is about our version of a steampunk lifestyle. From bitter experience I know that phrase is so threatening to some people that using it can get you labeled as pretentious or elitist. But there is no pretence to buying land. It is an enormous commitment of time and money from a family that doesn't have excess of either. There is no pretence to this blog for it will inevitably chronicle our failures as well as our successes and if hard manual labor is cause to label us as elitist so be it. If the phrase "steampunk lifestyle," threatens you stop reading now.

Still here? Good. So what exactly do we mean by a steampunk lifestyle? In its original literary definition steampunk imagines alternate realities wherein modern ideas and technology are mixed with ideas and technology from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So it is with a steampunk lifestyle, but unlike the literature we seek the best combination of new and old not just the most entertaining. Like the literature, the lifestyle begins with speculation: What would reality be like if all the best parts of the past had continued on but the best parts of the present had also developed? Unlike the literature, the lifestyle is about trying to make this reality “real” to the greatest extent that personal action makes possible.

For us it breaks down like this. In the nineteenth century, American households produced much of what they consumed, whether it was food, clothing, and household items like brooms or children’s toys or even the house itself. Other items we often locally produced. Things were designed to be repaired when they broke and could be salvaged and repurposed when they could not be repaired. Technological innovation was often accomplished by backyard inventors, and bold innovation was rewarded as often as not.

In contrast, twenty-first century American households are so addicted to consumerism that many people will pay three dollars and up at Starbucks rather than produce a cup of coffee for themselves. Not only is production no longer household and locally based, it often doesn’t even occur on the same continent as the consumption. Indeed, production often occurs on several different continents at different stages. Products are disposable, factory-sealed, and marked “no user serviceable parts inside". Technological innovation is accomplished in corporate R&D labs and innovations that don't favor corporate interests are suppressed. All of this is fueled by a petroleum based technology that, as Stirling points out, will soon die.

On the other hand, the nineteenth century was also an era of rampant imperialism with all its associated racism, sexism, homophobia, sexual repression, etc. Those who equate steampunk with Victorianism would do well to remember this. No sane person can deny that some progress has been made in some areas. There are also some technologies that can help us in our quest for something better. The steampunk movement's very existence is the result of ideas exchanged across the internet, and the solar panel captures hope as well as energy. Yet what is new is, on closer inspection, often secretly old. Bio Diesel is nothing but a return to the Diesel engines original fuel, peanut oil. As for organic local food production, it is only recently that this 12,000 year old technology was abandoned.

Much of these ideas are embodied in the urban homesteading movement already. This is why this blog's subtitle ties the concept of urban homesteading and steampunk together. I will explore this connection further in future posts. For now, we have begun our journey to an alternate reality, knowing that we may never achieve our goal completely. We have exchanged our newer condominium for house dug out of the property thrift store of foreclosure, and have begun the long hard process of turning it into a practical embodiment of steampunk as we have always seen it.