Tag: Politics

It was Sunday morning and the first thing I read on Facebook was a call from someone in the steampunk community demanding that another person be “unfriended” by all of her followers. Along with this, she posted a screencap of a meme this terrible person had posted which said, “Share if you also want to see Hillary Clinton in jail.” It had the former secretary of state’s face photoshopped behind bars.

For one anti-Clinton meme, this steampunk woman demanded the deplatforming of someone I didn’t even known before this incident. One wrong meme in some circles and you’re out.

By that logic, I should have been “canceled” a long time ago. I’ve disliked Hillary Clinton since the early 1990s. But social media has made it much easier to scout out thoughtcrimes. Don’t belong to the right political party? Don’t hate politicians from the other side? Someone will screencap something you wrote, share it on their own page and demand that you be shunned.

We’ve crossed into a weird McCarthyism — Jenny McCarthyism — where if you’re not liberal enough you’ll be chased out of whatever fandom you’re in.

P. Djeli Clark suggested earlier this year (sorry we didn’t pick up on it earlier) that steampunks should be glad to have activists among them who can constantly remind them of what they’re doing wrong.

Late last year, when an image of teenage pop star Justin Bieber wearing something of a steampunk outfit appeared online, the vast majority of steampunk fandom seemed appalled. For such an icon of contemporary pop culture (or lack thereof) as Justin Bieber to delve into the steampunk aesthetic was anathema to steampunks’ self image as defying the mainstream culture. Some said this marked the end of steampunk as an alternative culture altogether.

That in itself, our Marcus Rauchfuß observed, was evidence of steampunk having gone mainstream already.

“When a scene is truly underground,” he wrote, “new members are always welcome. People are excited about and very welcoming toward newcomers. The scene has to grow to a certain point for a style-police to emerge.”

Yet that has happened to steampunk. And it’s not something we can blame Justin Bieber for.

While most steampunks generally support a revival of nineteenth-century aesthetics as a response to modern alienation, many don’t like to acknowledge that their attitudes could be considered ideological.

Indeed! The quote comes from the article “Leftists Constructs,” published in the recent issue of the progressive Overland magazine and written by steampunk blogger Diana M. Pho of Beyond Victoriana.

Notice the subtlety: “steampunk don’t like to acknowledge that their attitudes could be considered ideological.” Of course, Pho is here to tell us that they are, whatever we like it or not.

What I’ve recently noticed quite a lot in steampunk is a sad and worrisome trend. Namely the fact that a lot of new things and newcomers get shot down immediately.

This attitude frankly reeks of elitism, something 90 percent of this international community has been priding itself on that it wouldn’t tumble down that road.