Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology PDF
Preview Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology
Vintage Tomorrows James H. Carrott and Brian David Johnson VINTAGE TOMORROWS by James H. Carrott and Brian David Johnson Copyright © 2013 James H. Carrott and Brian David Johnson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected]. Editors: Brian Jepson and Courtney Nash Proofreader: Christopher Hearse Production Editor: Christopher Hearse Indexer: Judith McConville Copyeditor: O’Reilly Publishing Services Cover Designer: Edie Freedman Interior Designer: David Futato Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest Cover photos courtesy of Jake von Slatt, who also built the devices pictured and who appears in the front cover image. February 2013: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition: See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781449337995 for release details. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Vintage Tomorrows and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc., was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. ISBN: 978-1-449-33799-5 [LSI] James: To Amelia and Beatrix. Both the future and the past are in your hands. Don’t believe “can’t.” Take leaps of faith. Never choose an answer over a question. And make it better. Brian: To James H. Carrott. This book began with him and he has been the heart and soul of Vintage Tomor- rows throughout the entire project. Thank you James! You are a gentleman and a scholar and it’s been a pleasure collaborating with you. Contents Foreword: Any | vii Questions? Prologue | xvii 1 | A Futurist and a Cultural Historian Walk into a Bar 1 2 | Beats, Pranksters, Hippies, Steampunks! 15 3 | Technology That Ships Broken 47 4 | A World-Destroying Death Ray Should Look Like a World- Destroying Death Ray 67 5 | Steampunk: A Dinner in Three Courses 87 PRELUDE | A Note from the Historian 117 6 | It’s About Chickens and Teapots 119 7 | Digging Into the Past 147 8 | History Has Sharp Edges 175 v vi | CONTENTS 9 | Punking Time in Key West 207 10 | The Answer’s in Our Own Backyard 231 11 | Makers and Burners 255 12 | Pop Goes Steampunk 279 PRELUDE | A Note from the Futurist 289 13 | Humor Is the New Killer App 291 14 | Don’t Forget the Humans 309 15 | When Is an iPhone Like a Pocket Watch? 323 16 | We Must Design a Better Future 337 17 | Humanity in the Machine 351 18 | We Want to Remember a Time When Our Lives Were Not Made of Plastic 367 19 | What’s Next? 379 A | Image Credits 385 Index 387 Foreword: Any Questions? Henry Jenkins Vintage Tomorrows started as a conversation between a cultural historian and a fu- turist: what might steampunk (as a genre, movement, lifestyle, and philosophy) teach us about the ways people are thinking about their relationships with tech- nology? They found it a gripping topic, they set out to talk with others, and the conversation kept broadening outward, as they found more thinking partners, many of whom were already talking through these questions together, and as one question led to another and another… Christopher Columbus sailed west to get east; these authors looked into our collective fantasies about the past (or rather yesterday’s tomorrows) in order to bet- ter understand our shared desires for the future. Ultimately, the authors hope peo- ple will design and build better tools because we have a deeper understanding of what makes technologies meaningful for people who spend a lot of time re- imagining and retrofitting 19th century devices and gadgets. Makes sense to me. I have been researching fan cultures for more than thirty years and participat- ing in them for much longer, so let me put steampunk into a larger context. I am going to be painting with pretty broad strokes, so bear with me. Like the authors, I think something profound is going on here. Vintage Tomorrows compares it with the “counter-cultures” of the 1960s and I can follow them there. After all, as tech- nology historian Fred Turner has suggested, the counterculture was the birthplace of today’s cyberculture. For me, the explanation for all of this starts elsewhere— with the origins of science fiction and of science fiction fandom, both of which have in turn influenced contemporary forms of participatory culture. The first thing you need to understand is that science fiction fandom has always been a community of people who were drawn together because they wanted to ask questions and most of the people around them found this constant probing to be annoying. The community’s conversation started in the early part of the 20th cen- vii viii | Foreword: Any Questions? tury and hasn’t slowed down since. Fandom doesn’t simply exist to give fans a chance to talk with each other about the stories they enjoy. Science fiction stories exist to give fans something to talk about with each other. Speculation is the name of the game, and fans play that game better than anyone else. The second thing you need to understand is that whatever steampunk is (and you will get lots of definitions here), it isn’t “Victorian science fiction.” If you asked Victorians about science fiction, they would not have a clue what you were talking about, though science fiction as a genre was profoundly and permanently shaped by the Victorian imagination. While many Victorians desperately wanted to believe in the stability of the empire and the power of tradition to give order and meaning to their lives, they were actually living at a moment of profound and prolonged change. One reason we are so preoccupied with the Late Victorian period, today, is that it may have been the last time, prior to the digital revolution, when our society confronted such a dramatic shift in its basic technological infrastructure. “New media” is a state of mind; every “old” media was “new” once, and people had to confront the changed realities that those new technologies might on the ways they saw the world. One way we cope with the shock of the new is to look backwards, hoping that the shock of the old might counteract its impact. So, the digital revo- lution has invited us to reconsider “The Victorian Internet,” as Tom Standage de- scribed the Telegraph, and a range of other devices that look differently to us today thanks to our access to networked computers. Steampunk represents one of a number of new kinds of historical consciousness that are emerging as people try to put themselves in the places of previous generations as they underwent a media revolution. Literary critic Jay Clayton’s delightful book, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture, explores many different connections people have drawn between the Victorian age and our own. Contrary to common stereotypes about rigid Victorian thinking, Clayton argues that the late 19th century was characterized by “undisciplined culture”: “[The 19th century thinkers] thrived in an atmosphere that might be described as predisciplinary, a world in which the professional characteristics of science as a discipline had not yet been codified…These men and women had an irreverent attitude towards boundaries and an impatience with anything resembling intellectual restraint. They mixed science, engineering, and the arts as they pleased. Without too much exag- geration, they might be described as the nineteenth-century equivalent of hackers.” The Victorians witnessed dramatic changes in the technologies of transporta- tion and production, but for my purposes, what seems most interesting is that there
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