Bikini Bottom’s Soap Factory: An Introduction to Dieselpunk

It was not a war machine, nor was it mere incitement to hatred.

It was the kind of cruel idea that can only come from someone who possesses the purest understanding of how society actually works at its foundations—someone whose cold gaze can pierce through every veil to see what lies beneath.

Blind disgust and hatred never last. Every hunt leaves survivors. People will not spontaneously rise up to hunt anchovies forever.

Unless.

Unless they treat these unsightly things the way a gardener tends his plot, the way you dust your house. Bikini Bottom is their garden—their future home of harmony and comfort, their immaculate cottage. And anchovies are not annoying neighbors. They are not beasts. They are seaweed. They are indoor dust. They are the kind of presence that people, in the course of maintaining the garden they know and love, will wipe away without pause.

But anchovies resist. They scream. When blood splashes onto faces, people panic. But… it’s fine.

He remembers Sandy’s documentary—the one about those surface-dwelling Homo sapiens and their most advanced experimental factories. The process from livestock slaughter to packaged food involved meticulous division of labor. Very few people are willing to personally butcher livestock. But everyone can comfortably enjoy cooked meat.

Anchovies are the same. The systematic extermination of these non-person vermin must be transformed into a process driven by a machine assembled from precision parts.

And then—how to replicate these factories at scale.

He needs an efficient, meticulous bureaucracy. Every individual is responsible only for the one task within their jurisdiction. Not a single person is engaged in work that could honestly be described as “exterminating anchovies.” They calculate. They measure. They issue orders. Only he alone can mobilize everyone into this grand deployment—only then can he realize everything described above.

In his purest, coldest mode of thought, Squidward does not smile.

But the plan has already taken shape in his mind. Now it is time to make it real.

We understand, therefore we slaughter.

This is dieselpunk. This is what happened after Jules Verne.

Those soldier boys who had devoured *Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas* and dreamed of circumnavigating the globe in eighty days—they grew up. And they took “understanding the principles” and applied it at a scale Verne could never have imagined. They turned it into the ultimate form of human instrumental reason made flesh.

Pre-modern: I understand the lever. I smash your skull.

Stone. Blade. Lead shot. One action. One enemy. One act of violence that can be witnessed. You use the principle of the lever to hurl a trebuchet’s payload. You use ballistics to calculate the trajectory of a cannonball. Principles serve violence—but violence remains bounded by muscle, gunpowder, and the visible battlefield.

Dieselpunk: I understand chemistry and logistics. I send ten million people into the soap factory.

This is not violence. Violence is smashing a skull—there is contact, there is rage, there are witnesses, there is one person killing another person directly. The soap factory is not violence. The soap factory is production. You enter as raw material. You exit as product. In between lies an entire industrial process that has been optimized to perfection: railway transport, classification and serial numbering, the chemical ratios of the gas canisters, the temperature control of the incinerators, the extraction of glycerin from remains, the compression into molds. Every single step conforms to scientific principles. Every single step can be written down in an operations manual.

There is no rage. No hatred. Not even ideology—ideology is merely the one-page preface that tells the manual’s reader: “These are raw materials, not people.” Turn that page, and everything that follows is nothing but administrative notices, usage guidelines, and quality control checklists.

This is the fundamental divide between steampunk and dieselpunk.

Steampunk asks: Can we build it?

Dieselpunk answers: We can build it. We already did. Look.

We no longer ask: “What if Ceasar had discovered three-phase electricity? What if King Arthur had invented the steam engine?”

We ask: “Humanity had already mastered the internal combustion engine, the radio, the assembly line, and the synthesis of poison gas. What happened next?”

Dieselpunk’s aesthetic is not science fiction.

It is archaeology.

It is what was excavated from the mud of the Somme and the ashes of Auschwitz. Scraps. Residue. Ruins.

Welcome to dieselpunk.

Up next: We survived, therefore we write poetry.

The principles have been dismantled and laid bare. The factory has already been built. We are already inside it.

Appendix: On the Theoretical Stakes of the "Soap Factory"

The allegorical argument presented above is a translated excerpt from a longer Chinese language work of dieselpunk cultural criticism. It engages—through the idiom of fiction—with a thesis most rigorously articulated in Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Bauman's argument, still capable of unsettling decades after its publication, is that the Holocaust was not a regression into barbarism, not a collapse of civilization into premodern savagery, but a product of civilization itself. The tools that made systematic genocide possible were not invented for that purpose. They were morally neutral achievements of industrial modernity: bureaucratic hierarchy, assemblyline production, scientific management, costbenefit analysis, and the division of labor into tasks so granular that no single actor in the chain need bear moral responsibility for the final output. The crime was not committed despite modernity. It was committed through modernity.

This is a familiar argument within Critical Theory circles—it extends, in recognizable ways, the lineage that runs from Weber's "iron cage" (stahlhartes Gehäuse) through Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of instrumental reason to Arendt's diagnosis of the "banality of evil." But Bauman's formulation remains uniquely generative for cultural analysis because it does not treat the Holocaust as a singular, ineffable rupture. It treats it as a configuration—a specific arrangement of otherwise ordinary institutional practices that, under particular historical conditions, produced industrial extermination. This shift from singularity to configuration is what makes Bauman's work not merely a historical argument but a theoretical toolkit for analyzing any social formation where bureaucracy, technology, and ideology converge.

The "soap factory" allegory is a fictionalized exploration of what that configuration looks like when translated into the grammar of worldbuilding. It is not a metaphor for any specific historical regime. It is an experiment in conceptual modeling—the construction of a narrative apparatus that isolates and dramatizes the structural features Bauman identifies:

1. A classification system that sorts beings into "persons" and "raw materials"—a taxonomic operation that precedes and authorizes all subsequent processing. The concept draws on the Foucauldian insight that classification is never epistemically innocent; it is always already a form of power that constitutes its objects rather than merely describing them. In the allegory, "anchovies" are not a biological category. They are a residue category—that which must be removed for "the garden" to remain itself.

2. A production pipeline that processes the classified population without requiring any single stage to involve hatred, sadism, or moral conviction. This is Bauman's central insight rendered in procedural terms: the substitution of technical responsibility for moral responsibility. Each worker on the assembly line performs a task that, taken in isolation, is ethically unremarkable—scheduling a train, recording a serial number, adjusting a valve, maintaining a temperature reading. The horror exists only at the level of the totality, and no individual occupies the position from which the totality can be seen.

3. A bureaucratic architecture that distributes agency so finely across a hierarchy that moral accountability dissolves into the gaps between positions. This is Bauman's extension of Weber: bureaucracy is not merely efficient; it is a technology for the production of moral distance. The more finely divided the labor, the more impossible it becomes for any participant to experience their actions as causally connected to the outcome. The railway scheduler does not feel responsible for the condition of the freight, and the freight is not identifiable as human once it has been processed through the language of logistics.

4. An ideology of cleanliness or order that reframes elimination as maintenance. The conceptual move from "killing" to "cleaning" is not merely rhetorical. It is a transformation of the ethical grammar of the act. Gardens are not sites of violence. Weeding is not a moral decision. It is a hygienic practice—something you do not because you hate the weeds but because you want the garden to flourish. The allegory's Squidward does not hate anchovies. He simply understands that a clean garden requires their systematic removal. This is, in Bauman's terms, the substitution of aesthetic criteria (order, cleanliness, harmony) for ethical criteria (guilt, responsibility, justice). The crime is committed not in the grip of passion but in the calm conviction that things will look better when it is done.

The allegory's contribution to Critical Theory discussions is not its originality—these concepts have been extensively theorized. It is its mode of presentation. By compressing Bauman's distributed argument into a single, vivid narrative scenario—a familiar cartoon character contemplating the industrial processing of a disliked population—the allegory achieves something that theoretical prose often cannot: it makes the affective texture of instrumental reason palpable. The reader is not told that bureaucracy produces moral distance. The reader watches Squidward designing his factory in a state of complete emotional neutrality. The reader feels, in the rhythm of the prose, how easily the logic of garden maintenance slides into the logic of industrial slaughter. This is not argument by metaphor. It is argument by defamiliarization—the rendering strange of what has become too familiar to provoke the horror it deserves.

For those interested in the broader project from which this excerpt is drawn: the original Chineselanguage series develops these themes across six installments, tracing the dieselpunk configuration through topics including the firebombing of Dresden (and Kurt Vonnegut's narrative response to it), the evolution of radio propaganda technology (and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète as an accidental countercurrent), the systematic exclusion of women from the category of "combatant" in postWWII Europe, the Soviet practice of broadcasting Swan Lake for four hours during regime transitions as a form of conspiratorial silence, and the I.G. Farben company's rental of concentration camp labor at a "genderequal" wage of zero marks per day. Each installment functions as what the author calls "dieselpunk archaeology"—not an exercise in nostalgia or aesthetic appreciation, but an excavation of how the tools of industrial modernity have been used, repurposed, and resisted across the past century.

The argument is not that dieselpunk as a genre can solve the problems Bauman identifies. It is that dieselpunk—understood as a mode of critical imagination rather than merely an aesthetic style—can render those problems visible in ways that theoretical discourse alone may not.

Mods: This post is a translated excerpt from a Chinese language work of dieselpunk cultural criticism that draws substantially on Bauman, Weber, and related Critical Theory traditions. I believe the argument—that fiction can function as a mode of theoretical modeling for concepts like instrumental reason and the production of moral distance—falls within the scope of this subreddit's engagement with cultural analysis through a criticaltheoretical lens. Happy to revise if the boundary is uncertain.