Also steampunk although nobody EVER knew what the punk meant there

Steampunk has never been punk. It’s just “wouldn’t it be nice if I was a rich victorian capalist and aristocrat but also with access to a doomsday machine.”

Steampunk was a complex movement centered around proving how the problem wasn’t technology but social customs that kept us divided. Most optimistic steampunk fiction that occurs in a high science fiction setting is either idealized (full automation) and/or an actual commentary on capitalism and classism.

People like to dress up and use the aesthetic because they enjoy it, and as of yet there is no other word (to my knowledge) for the aesthetic side of it.

Also, steampunk has a lot of branches/derivatives as well. In dieselpunk, the focus is on limited resources and the futility of fossil fuels (think of the video game Frostpunk). Atompunk is all about humanity’s doomed obsession with nuclear energy and weaponry (the entire Fallout series). Stitchpunk is just meant to be pretty plainly creepy and dark, bridging the old-fashioned with the modern to create Things That Should Not For The Love of God Exist (Coraline, 9, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands) in the eyes of society and then going on to either use that instinctual revulsion as a symbol of evil or to smash down the consumer’s prejudices about the character/item.

Punk addressed more topics than just anarchism and anti-capitalism. It also tackled prejudice, classism, human arrogance, etc..

punk is also an angry retort to current norms. it’s not a coincidence that steampunk took off in the 00′s, when the digital age was closing in around us and all of our consumer electronics got harder to understand and even more boring to look at. technology did more for us than ever, but it was an awful combination of cheaply made and expensive to purchase, you couldn’t build it or repair it or save it or even understand it, and it generally looked like a sleek plastic block. the iraq war was going on, scientists were starting to scream about global warming, everyone wanted to suck apple’s slick white dongle, the new century was fucking terrifying. everything was hot and loud and cheap and plastic and scary and oversimplified ultrasleek ugly and new, new, new! 

steampunk borrows imperial aesthetics, and that’s a shame, but it’s specifically a romantic escape from the new millennium’s minimalism and consumerism, as well as an interrogation of the class divides any imperial power maintains within itself and the nature of consumption itself.  people, machines, money, dreams. 

there’s a reason gears became the central symbol of the genre, aside from looking cool: we wanted authentic interiority, as everything around us turned digital. we wanted authenticity. we wanted machines we could take apart and touch, and we wanted beauty. we wanted machines made of iron and wood that you could fix with a wrench, lush costumes with layers of embroidery, the promise of freedom and adventure on your airship while you looked dope as shit in your fancy corset. 

steampunk was only as shallow as the aesthetic slap-a-cog on it edges appeared. the center of it was punk.