Table Of ContentVintage 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.
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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
