I’ve long been fascinated by the Steampunk movement, and Nick Harkaway’s The Steampunk Movement Is Good And Important is another great essay on the topic. Nick starts by explaining why Steampunk appeals to people (“it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale,” and “it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical, that which we can understand with our fingers”). He then goes on to explain how different this is from modern technologies like cell phones:

The ethos admits of failure: Steampunk devices almost are not working properly if they don’t have leaks, if they don’t require maintenance and the occasional thump. That’s where they get character and animation, identities of their own which reflect their owners, while every iPhone can be seen as Apple’s endlessly replicated identity given passage into your every waking moment, a tiny and instantly replaceable cloned shopfront: what role is conferred or imposed by such a device on the person carrying it? It’s not that Jonathan Ive’s designs are poor, it’s that they are profoundly truthful: an iPhone is a vector, not an object, valued by its creator for its purpose and interchangeability, not individuality.

Steampunk, on the other hand, repurposes, scavenges, remakes and embellishes in an arena where embellishment is seen as decadence, never mind the inherent decadence of creating the sheer amount of computing power our society now possesses in order that most of it should sit idle or be used for email and occasional games of Plants vs Zombies.

Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.