Steampunk

If H.R. Giger had read "The difference engine" and worked at Jackson Guitars, I think something similar to "The Villanizer" could have been the outcome.

The Villanizer, worth $2275 on eBay.

"The difference engine" by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson is a good novel by the way, well worth reading. The story takes place in an alternative 19th century where a technical revolution of huge mechanical and steam powered computers (i.e. Charles Babbage's difference engine) has happened, and of it's social and political consequences. There's a whole genre apparently, called steampunk.

As I see it, it gives a kind of outside view on how technology affects societies, since it describes a scenario the reader hasn't been part of.
How easy is it for most of of us to envision a world without electrical light, cheap local and global transportation, realtime communication all over the world and everything that follows in its footsteps?

Now there's an ongoing change in Africa and Asia enabled by cell phones.

As Buckminister Fuller put it, even relative poor people have access to drugs to cure illnesses that earlier were fatal and fast, comfortable transportation not available even to the richest and most powerful earlier in the history. "Four billion billionaires" he called the humankind, even if one might think he was a very optimistic technocrat (in a good sense). The problems of the world isn't necessary of technological nature...

/O.K.
(Listening to while posting: Sunn O))) - Etna)