For those of us who’ve been watching the course of
industrial civilization’s decline and fall, the last few weeks have been a bit
of a wild ride. To begin with, as noted
in last week’s post, the specter of peak oil has once again risen from the tomb
to which the mass media keeps trying to consign it, and stalks the shadows of
contemporary life, scaring the bejesus out of everyone who wants to believe
that infinite economic growth on a finite planet isn’t a self-defeating
absurdity.
Then, of course, it started seeping out into the media that
the big petroleum companies have lost a very large amount of money in recent
quarters, and a significant part of those losses were due to their heavy
investments in the fracking boom in the United States—you know, the fracking
boom that was certain to bring us renewed prosperity and limitless cheap fuel
into the foreseeable future? That turned
out to a speculative bubble, as readers of this blog were warned a year ago. The overseas investors whose
misspent funds kept the whole circus going are now bailing out, and the bubble
has nowhere to go but down. How far down? That's a very good question that very
few people want to answer.
The fracking bubble is not, however, the only thing that's
falling. What the financial press likes to call “emerging markets”—I suspect
that “submerging markets” might be a better label at the moment—have had a very
bad time of late, with stock markets all over the Third World racking up
impressive losses, and some nasty downside action spilled over onto Wall
Street, Tokyo and the big European exchanges as well. Meanwhile, the financial
world has been roiled by the apparent suicides of four important bankers. If
any of them left notes behind, nobody's saying what those notes might contain;
speculation, in several senses of that word, abounds.
Thus it's probably worth being aware of the possibility that
in the weeks and months ahead, we'll see another crash like the one that hit in
2008-2009: another milestone passed on the road down from the summits of
industrial civilization to the deindustrial dark ages of the future. No doubt,
if we get such a crash, it'll be accompanied by a flurry of predictions that
the whole global economy will come to a sudden stop. There were plenty of
predictions along those lines during the 2008-2009 crash; they were wrong then,
and they'll be wrong this time, too, but it'll be few months before that becomes
apparent.
In the meantime, while we wait to see whether the market
crashes and another round of fast-crash predictions follows suit, I'd like to
talk about something many of my readers may find whimsical, even irrelevant.
It's neither, but that, too, may not become apparent for a while.
Toward the middle of last month, as regular readers will
recall, I posted an essay here suggesting seven sustainable technologies that
could be taken up, practiced, and passed down to the societies that will emerge
out of the wreckage of ours. One of those was computer-free mathematics, using
slide rules and the other tools people used to crunch numbers before they
handed over that chunk of their mental capacity to machines. In the discussion
that followed, one of my readers—a college professor in the green-technology
end of things—commented with some amusement on the horrified response he’d
likely get if he suggested to his students that they use a slide rule for their
number-crunching activities.
Not at all, I replied; all he needed to do was stand in
front of them, brandish the slide rule in front of their beady eyes, and say,
“This, my friends, is a steampunk calculator.”
It occurs to me that those of my readers who don’t track the
contemporary avant-garde may have no idea what that next to last word
means; like so many labels these days,
it contains too much history to have a transparent meaning. Doubtless, though,
all my readers have at least heard of punk rock. During the 1980s, a mostly forgettable
literary movement in science fiction got labeled “cyberpunk;” the first half of
the moniker referenced the way it fetishized the behavioral tics of 1980s
hacker culture, and the second was given it because it made a great show, as
punk rockers did, of being brash and belligerent. The phrase caught on, and during the next
decade or so, every subset of science fiction that hadn’t been around since
Heinleins roamed the earth got labeled fill-in-the-blankpunk by somebody or
other.
Steampunk got its moniker during those years, and that’s
where the “-punk” came from. The “steam” is another matter. There was an
alternative-history novel, The Difference Engine by William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling, set in a world in which Victorian computer pioneer
Charles Babbage launched the cybernetic revolution a century in advance with
steam-powered mechanical computers.
There was also a roleplaying game called Space
1889—take a second look at those numbers if you think that has
anything to do with the 1970s TV show about Moonbase Alpha—that had Thomas
Edison devising a means of spaceflight, and putting the Victorian earth in
contact with alternate versions of Mars, Venus and the Moon straight out of
Edgar Rice Burroughs-era space fantasy.
Those and a few other sources of inspiration like them got
artists, craftspeople, writers, and the like
thinking about what an advanced technology might look like if the
revolutions triggered by petroleum and electronics had never happened, and Victorian
steam-powered technology had evolved along its own course. The result is steampunk: part esthetic pose, part artistic and
literary movement, part subculture, part excuse for roleplaying and assorted
dress-up games, and part—though I’m far from sure how widespread this latter
dimension is, or how conscious—a collection of sweeping questions about some of
the most basic presuppositions undergirding modern technology and the modern
world.
It’s very nearly an article of faith in contemporary
industrial society that any advanced technology—at least until it gets so
advanced that it zooms off into pure fantasy—must by definition look much like
ours. I’m thinking here of such otherwise impressive works of alternate history
as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. Novels
of this kind portray the scientific and industrial revolution happening
somewhere other than western Europe, but inevitably it’s the same scientific
and industrial revolution, producing much the same technologies and many of the
same social and cultural changes. This reflects the same myopia of the
imagination that insists on seeing societies that don’t use industrial
technologies as “stuck in the Middle Ages” or “still in the Stone Age,” or what
have you: the insistence that all human
history is a straight line of progress that leads unstoppably to us.
Steampunk challenges that on at least two fronts. First, by
asking what technology would look like if the petroleum and electronics
revolutions had never happened, it undercuts the common triumphalist notion
that of course an advanced technology must look like ours,
function like ours, and—ahem—support the same poorly concealed economic,
political, and cultural agendas hardwired into the technology we currently
happen to have. Despite such thoughtful works as John Ellis’ The
Social History of the Machine Gun, the role of such agendas in
defining what counts for progress remains a taboo subject, and the idea that
shifts in historical happenstance might have given rise to wholly different
“advanced technologies” rarely finds its way even into the wilder ends of
speculative fiction.
If I may be permitted a personal reflection here, this is
something I watched during the four years when my novel Star’s
Reach was appearing as a monthly blog post. 25th-century Meriga—yes,
that’s “America” after four centuries—doesn’t fit anywhere on that imaginary
line of progress running from the caves to the stars; it’s got its own cultural
forms, its own bricolage of old and new technologies, and its own way of
understanding history in which, with some deliberate irony, I assigned today’s
industrial civilization most of the same straw-man roles that we assign to the
societies of the preindustrial past.
As I wrote the monthly episodes of Star’s
Reach, though, I fielded any number of suggestions about what I
should do with the story and the setting, and a good any of those amounted to
requests that I decrease the distance separating 25th-century Meriga from the
modern world, or from some corner of the known past. Some insisted that some bit of modern
technology had to find a place in Merigan society, some urged me to find room
somewhere in the 25th-century world for enclaves where a modern industrial
society had survived, some objected to a plot twist that required the disproof
of a core element of today’s scientific worldview—well, the list is long, and I
think my readers will already have gotten the point.
C.S. Lewis was once asked by a reporter whether he thought
he’d influenced the writings of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. If I recall
correctly, he said, “Influence Tolkien? You might as well try to influence a
bandersnatch.” While I wouldn’t dream of claiming to be Tolkien’s equal as a
writer, I share with him—and with bandersnatches, for that matter—a certain
resistance to external pressures, and so Meriga succeeded to some extent in
keeping its distance from more familiar futures. The manuscript’s now at the
publisher, and I hope to have a release date to announce before too long; what
kind of reception the book will get when it’s published is another question
and, at least to me, an interesting one.
Outside of the realms of imaginative fiction, though, it’s
rare to see any mention of the possibility that the technology we ended up with
might not be the inevitable outcome of a scientific revolution. The boldest
step in that direction I’ve seen so far comes from a school of historians who
pointed out that the scientific revolution depended, in a very real sense, on
the weather in the English Channel during a few weeks in 1688. It so happened that the winds in those weeks
kept the English fleet stuck in port while William of Orange carried out the
last successful invasion (so far) of England by a foreign army.
As a direct result, the reign of James II gave way to that
of William III, and Britain dodged the absolute monarchy, religious
intolerance, and technological stasis that Louis XIV was imposing in France
just then, a model which most of the rest of Europe promptly copied. Because
Britain took a different path—a path defined by limited monarchy, broad
religious and intellectual tolerance, and the emergence of a new class of
proto-industrial magnates whose wealth was not promptly siphoned off into the
existing order, but accumulated the masses of capital needed to build the
world’s first industrial economy—the scientific revolution of the late 17th and
early 18th century was not simply a flash in the pan. Had James II remained on
the throne, it’s argued, none of those things would have happened.
It shows just how thoroughly the mythology of progress has
its claws buried in our imaginations that many people respond to that
suggestion in an utterly predictable way—by insisting that the scientific and
industrial revolutions would surely have taken place somewhere else, and given
rise to some close equivalent of today’s technology anyway. (As previously
noted, that’s the underlying assumption of the Kim Stanley Robinson novel cited
above, and many other works along the same lines.) At most, those who get past this notion of
industrial society’s Manifest Destiny imagine a world in which the industrial
revolution never happened: where, say,
European technology peaked around 1700 with waterwheels, windmills, square-rigged
ships, and muskets, and Europe went from there to follow the same sort of
historical trajectory as the Roman Empire or T’ang-dynasty China.
Further extrapolations along those lines can be left to the
writers of alternative history. The point being made by the writers,
craftspeople, and fans of steampunk, though, cuts in a different direction.
What the partly imaginary neo-Victorian tech of steampunk suggests is that
another kind of advanced technology is possible: one that depends on steam and
mechanics instead of petroleum and electronics, that accomplishes some of the
same things our technology does by different means, and that also does
different things—things that our technologies don’t do, and in some cases quite
possibly can’t do.
It’s here that steampunk levels its second and arguably more
serious challenge against the ideology that sees modern industrial society as
the zenith, so far, of the march of progress. While it drew its original
inspiration from science fiction and roleplaying games, what shaped steampunk
as an esthetic and cultural movement was a sense of the difference between the
elegant craftsmanship of the Victorian era and the shoddy plastic junk that
fills today’s supposedly more advanced culture. It’s a sense that was already
clear to social critics such as Theodore Roszak many decades ago. Here’s
Roszak’s cold vision of the future awaiting industrial society, from his
must-read book Where the Wasteland Ends:
“Glowing advertisements of undiminished progress will
continue to rain down upon us from official quarters; there will always be
well-researched predictions of light at the end of every tunnel. There will be
dazzling forecasts of limitless affluence; there will even be much
real affluence. But nothing will ever quite work the way the
salesmen promised; the abundance will be mired in organizational confusion and
bureaucratic malaise, constant environmental emergency, off-schedule policy, a
chaos of crossed circuits, clogged pipelines, breakdowns in communication,
overburdened social services. The data banks will become a jungle of
misinformation, the computers will suffer from chronic electropsychosis. The
scene will be indefinably sad and shoddy despite the veneer of orthodox
optimism. It will be rather like a world’s fair in its final days, when things
start to sag and disintegrate behind the futuristic façades, when the rubble
begins to accumulate in the corners, the chromium to grow tarnished, the neon
lights to burn out, all the switches and buttons to stop working. Everything
will take on that vile tackiness which only plastic can assume, the look of
things decaying that were never supposed to grow old, or stop gleaming, never
to cease being gay and sleek and perfect.”
As prophecies go, you must admit, this one was square on the
mark. Roszak’s nightmare vision has duly
become the advanced, progressive, cutting-edge modern society in which we live
today. That’s what the steampunk
movement is rejecting in its own way, by pointing out the difference between the
handcrafted gorgeousness of an older generation of technology and the “vile
tackiness which only plastic can assume” that dominates contemporary products
and, indeed, contemporary life. It’s an increasingly widespread recognition,
and helps explain why so many people these days are into some form of
reenactment.
Whether it’s the new Middle Ages of the Society for Creative
Anachronism, the frontier culture of buckskinners and the rendezvous scene, the
military-reenactment groups recreating the technologies and ambience of any
number of of long-ago wars, the primitive-technology enthusiasts getting
together to make flint arrowheads and compete at throwing spears with atlatls,
or what have you: has any other society
seen so many people turn their backs on the latest modern conveniences to take
pleasure in the technologies and habits of earlier times? Behind this interest
in bygone technologies, I suggest, lies a concept that’s even more
unmentionable in polite company than the one I discussed above: the recognition
that most of the time, these days, progress no longer means improvement.
By and large, the latest new, advanced, cutting-edge
products of modern industrial society are shoddier, flimsier, and more thickly
frosted with bugs, problems, and unwanted side effects than whatever they replaced.
It’s becoming painfully clear that we’re no longer progressing toward some
shiny Jetsons future, if we ever were, nor are we progressing over a cliff into
a bigger and brighter apocalypse than anyone ever had before. Instead, we’re
progressing steadily along the downward curve of Roszak’s dystopia of slow
failure, into a crumbling and dilapidated world of spiraling dysfunctions
hurriedly patched over, of systems that don’t really work any more but are
never quite allowed to fail, in which more and more people every year find
themselves shut out of a narrowing circle of paper prosperity but in which no
public figure ever has the courage to mention that fact.
Set beside that bleak prospect, it’s not surprising that the
gritty but honest hands-on technologies and lifeways of earlier times have a
significant appeal. There’s also a
distinct sense of security that comes from the discovery that one can actually
get by, and even manage some degree of comfort, without having a gargantuan
fossil-fueled technostructure on hand to meet one’s every need. What intrigues
me about the steampunk movement, though, is that it’s gone beyond that kind of
retro-tech to think about a different way in which technology could have
developed—and in the process, it’s thrown open the door to a reevaluation of
the technologies we’ve got, and thus to the political, economic, and cultural
agendas which the technologies we’ve got embody, and thus inevitably further.
Well, that’s part of my interest, at any rate. Another part
is based on the recognition that Victorian technology functioned quite
effectively on a very small fraction of the energy that today’s industrial
societies consume. Estimates vary, but even the most industrialized countries
in the world in 1860 got by on something like ten per cent of the energy per
capita that’s thrown around in industrial nations today. The possibility therefore exists that
something like a Victorian technology, or even something like the neo-Victorian
extrapolations of the steampunk scene, might be viable in a future on the far
side of peak oil, when the much more diffuse, intermittent, and limited energy
available from renewable sources will be what we have left to work with for the
rest of our species’ time on this planet.
For the time being, I want to let that suggestion percolate
through the crawlspaces of my readers’ imaginations. Those who want to pick up a steampunk
calculator and start learning how to crunch numbers with it—hint: it’s easy to learn, useful in practice, and
slide rules come cheap these days—may just have a head start on the future, but
that’s a theme for a later series of posts. Well before we get to that, it’s
important to consider a far less pleasant kind of blast from the past, one that
bids fair to play a significant role in the future immediately ahead.