From Subcultures to Micro-networks: Revising the Modern Narrative of Progress

In this essay, I consider two sites of group life in which revisions of the narrative of progress have emerged in contemporary cultural contexts, those spaces occupied by steampunk and by the return of the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer in hip-hop music production. This analysis works to establish micro-networking as frame through which subcultural activity can be viewed, such that the relationality of the human and the technological clearly emerges. I argue, then, that the revelatory frame of the micronetwork allows the nuanced work of technological anachronism in steampunk and 808 hip-hop music production to surface as neither simple throwback nostalgia nor fear of an encroaching technological apocalypse. Each micro-network is imbricated with a unique revision of the American progress narrative—revisions that actively embrace the anxious, questioning posture of dystopic considerations of an accelerating technologization while maintaining a celebratory and often technophilic proximity to specific media technologies.