Steampunk Vs. Dieselpunk

Every day, my Google alerts rounds up news from around the interwebs and sends me the compiled report. On Thursday, an absolute gem was deposited into my inbox.

Turns out Nissan is plugging a new electric car and made a video that conceptualizes a world run on diesel. Here's what a Business Insider writer had to say about it:

"And Nissan continues to plug its electric vehicle (EV) offering with a new marketing campaign. In it, the company presents a world where every device is run on gasoline. Imagine an MP3 player, a hair dryer, a cell phone, a microwave oven and other devices run on gas and you get an idea. Very steampunk concept, if you ask me."

No, no, no and more no.

Steampunk is the future reimagined from a Victorian perspective. Because they had no way to anticipate other sources of power, such as gas, if they had the ability to invent the machinery, computers, cell phones, etc. we have today, they would have tried to make them work with steam power, hence steampunk. It's alternate history, people.

What the writer of the Nissan article really wanted to say to describe the article was that it was dieselpunk, the future reimagined from a 1920s to 1950s industrialized perspective where everything would have been run on, well, diesel.

It may sound silly but if you're going to reference a subculture, you may as well understand the difference between the branches of it. Sounds like my next post needs to be on the different "punk" variants.