Why aren't megacorps as big a part of Steampunk as they are of Cyberpunk?
- Thread starter Bohandas
- Start date
I think quite a few steampunk settings do have megacorps (or at least their Gilded Age equivalents, robber barons and their feudal corporations which own entire towns and are essential to national and international economies). But there’s lots of reasons why they don’t necessarily look like cyberpunk megacorps.
Watsonian:
Watsonian:
- Communications technologies are much less advanced in steampunk - people don’t have phones, TVs, or social media - so there’s no pervasive mass media and sense of universal indoctrination and monitoring that often comes with megacorps. There’s no Twitter or Facebook or even TV ads.
- Robber barons are often less international than megacorps - they aren’t Amazon - and they are less diversified, so it’s not as if Standard Oil also makes diapers or prints books. There’s also much less mass consumption in steampunk, most people aren’t buying much in the way of consumer items regularly.
- However, robber barons absolutely exert as much social and financial control as they can, but it’s much less obvious than in a cyberpunk setting where everyone knows everything but nobody cares. They will own newspapers and politicians but they don’t tell everyone about it. Investigative journalism is in its infancy and innovators in this field often get defenestrated without it being reported in the papers.
- Unlike cyberpunk, steampunk is more romantic and idealised for some people, it’s an aesthetic that isn’t necessarily keen to remind people just how awful the Gilded Age actually was. So writers may avoid clear reminders of modern megacorp domination.
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Desdichado
Legend
No, they don't fit it at all. There were no corporations in the truly modern sense, just robber barons and industrial tycoons.
yeah. it is even true of a lot of "cyberpunk." The -punk just means "aesthetic" now.
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
The Steampunk era was still about the Great Empires. Mercantilism was a thing hence Robber Barons but the East India Company was still reliant on the British Crown for its legal charters and the Royal Navy of ultimate protection.
Also Steampunk works best with single Mad Geniuses and an Industrial Villain who can be confronted rather than the faceless "Board of Directors"
Also Steampunk works best with single Mad Geniuses and an Industrial Villain who can be confronted rather than the faceless "Board of Directors"
MarkB
Legend
Steampunk evokes the traits of the actual Victorian era, and that was a time of great empires and political machinations. Corporations exist in service of the Crown, or its equivalent.
It's also an era of great invention and innovation, where the ideas of a few people can drive large-scale change, so while companies may adopt new technologies it's individual independent scientists and engineers who are coming up with them in the first place.
It's also an era of great invention and innovation, where the ideas of a few people can drive large-scale change, so while companies may adopt new technologies it's individual independent scientists and engineers who are coming up with them in the first place.
The Gilded Age was startlingly similar to our own era - which is basically cyberpunk without the readily available prosthetics, pity, I could use some decent cybereyes - in the rise of powerful corporations that monopolised trade and production (and owned newspapers and thus controlled mass media), were extremely influential in government (with most politicians in their pockets one way or another), and owned millions of workers like serfs. Oh, and of course it was the heyday of colonialism, with the scramble for Africa in full swing. We do a bit less of that now, but not much.
We’re in a new Gilded Age now and I fear we will not manage to curb it with the rise of unions and antitrust law as they did back then. I’m sadly not surprised that many people reading or gaming in steampunk don’t want to be reminded of their own lives and political reality.
We’re in a new Gilded Age now and I fear we will not manage to curb it with the rise of unions and antitrust law as they did back then. I’m sadly not surprised that many people reading or gaming in steampunk don’t want to be reminded of their own lives and political reality.
Steampunk draws on periods of time where the efforts to maintain class difference was beginning to deteriorate in light of advances on a number of fronts. As some mentioned above as well, there's still much unknown in the world too.
Owning a company or a business was still looked down upon by particular circles.
Cyberpunk plays more in post-capitalist settings. Everything is a grind, institutions and corporations are devouring each other and themselves. While mobility is more fluid than their cousin above, the place of the individual getting lost in the overbuilt, hulking behemoth that is life tends to be one of several big concerns.
The Gilded Age is post-Victorian (Edwardian).
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