Steampunk Hands Around the World 2017 – How Did We Get ‘Here’?

Image Courtesy of Mr. XPK

In the real world, there’s strife, hardship, and a world seemingly in aggravated turmoil. There’s also admirable displays of leadership, generosity, and genuine compassion.

In the steampunk community world, we have, and had, our share of disagreements, destruction, and ego, but we’ve also had shining examples of outreach, communication, and engagement.

Steampunk and the community makes our lives better by creating an environment to research and review history on several levels – national, local, community, and self. It all gives us perspective and knowledge how to ensure we do not fall into the trap of “Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it”.  Each one of us has the ability and responsibility to learn, apply, and guide.

Looking at the real history of the 1800s, we can understand the foundations which led to next steps which ultimately brought us to this world we live in. Why is there race inequality in some (all?) countries? Why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Why is there cultural and philosophical animosity between Group A and Group B? Why are we just now getting to adopting electric and self driving cars? Why isn’t the future I was promised here now? Where is my jet pack?!!!

Similarly, we can see how our steampunk community has grown and evolved  in a fairly short period of time to be the groups and events, and the ‘feel’, which we have today. Which groups persist and which have fallen by the wayside. Which expressions of steampunk get more attention and which have faded to obscurity? How have topics of discussion changed from year to year? How are things different now from the start of regularly held conventions, to before that when there were just message boards, and before that when very tiny groups of people talked about a similar world theme in books they had read?

In the previous post, we briefly looked at how the steampunk worlds we create show us those things we want to be part of our future. it’s important in that process to recognize the reasons why things are they way they are — we need to learn how things work if we want to change those systems and build better ones.

Steampunk in its many forms can lead us to learn how, and why, and with that knowledge, we can understand more fully the here and now.

How does steampunk help you better make sense of “here”?

 

Follow along each day as new entries are added to the Official Link List and join the discussions on the Facebook event page.