Exploring Steampunk in the Modern Era
Hi, my beautiful net-baes! This is [bubblegumprincess] here writing once again, and I hope you’re as excited as me.
My question today is inspired by Steampunk—a genre that, like Solarpunk, is radical in its own way. It’s not just about brass goggles and airships; at its core, Steampunk is a challenge to contemporary technological systems and the increasing tension between automation and individual subjectivity. As Dr. Kathe Hicks Albreche, who did her PhD in Steampunk studies, says, it is “a challenge to contemporary philosophical theories, and an odd tension between the technology-driven systems seen today and the basic human need for individual expression and autonomy.”
More than its Victorian aesthetic and retro-futuristic machines, Steampunk makes us ask an important question: What does it mean to be human today? The genre explores our anxieties around technology by taking us back to a time when machines were tangible, mechanical, and deeply intertwined with human craftsmanship. Unlike today’s seamless, algorithmic automation, Steampunk machines require human labor, skill, and direct interaction, creating a contrast to the way AI and digital tech often erase human agency.
Airships and mechanical automations powered by steam provide another environmentally friendly way to power technology and cities. One of my favorite Ghibli films, Howl's Moving Castle, uses Steampunk technology in its storyline, and if you’re interested, I would highly recommend you give it a watch. While we often feel nostalgic about the past, Steampunk provides an aesthetic and an idea to combine the past with the modern and the future.
This connects beautifully to Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which critiques the rigid boundaries between human and machine. Haraway proposes the cyborg as a political and philosophical figure—an entity that exists between the biological and the mechanical, challenging binaries like human vs. machine, male vs. female, and even physical vs. digital. She suggests that embracing hybridity, rather than resisting it, could lead to a more inclusive and fluid understanding of identity and agency.
Steampunk, in its own way, plays with these very ideas. It takes technological progress and re-imagines it as something mechanical, tactile, and deeply human, rather than an invisible force governed by faceless corporations and AI. If Haraway’s cyborg is a hopeful political myth for a future where identity is hybrid and fluid, then Steampunk’s gears and steam-powered automatons ask us to consider an alternate path—one where technology is something we see, touch, and control.
This also brings me to Jean-François Lyotard and his concerns about “human software.” He questions whether our brains (our biological hardware) will be sufficient for the future or whether we will need to integrate with new technological forms to survive. Steampunk, while nostalgic for the past, engages with this question by imagining a world where technology is still grounded in human interaction rather than an abstract, posthuman future.
Steampunk and poststructuralist thought both seek to break down binaries—whether it’s human vs. machine, past vs. future, or even natural vs. artificial. They subvert the traditional Western narratives of salvation, apocalypse, and a return to origins. Instead, they offer us alternatives: a fragmented, complex, and non-linear future where technology and humanity evolve together.
So what do we take away from all this? If Solarpunk envisions a harmonious future where technology is embedded seamlessly into nature, Steampunk makes us question how we interact with technology and whether we’ve lost something in the shift to digital automation. Should technology be something we manipulate with our hands, or something that fades into the background like an omnipresent force?
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Is Steampunk’s approach to technology more empowering than today’s invisible AI systems? Should we return to a more mechanical, hands-on relationship with tech, or fully embrace the seamless integration of human and machine? Let me know in the comments!
Until next time, stay radical and keep questioning the world around you. <3
Aestheticaste
VIDEOS TO WATCH-
Steampunk Marxism
Simple steampunk breakdown
