067 - why the girls are building cyberdecks
whimsy tech! raspberry pis and tech literacy!
Yesterday my interest in the internet baddies building cyberdecks PEAKED. I ended up opening my laptop and furiously typing this late last night and decided I would have to post it today!! I could not even sleep because I was thinking of all the things I could build with a cyberdeck!
If you’ll remember a few weeks ago I referenced creator ubeboobey for building her mermaid cyberdeck. Since then, we have seen more and more of the girlies showing off their whimsical creations, to the point that Google Trends saw the growth of the search query reach an all time high last week.
What gets me very excited about this movement is that it represents a group of people who just want fun tech back. People who are fed up with the internet that has been built for them and are quietly, creatively, sometimes chaotically, building their own way out. An extension of frictionmaxxing, the cyberdecks are a push back against the optimisation of everything, and reframing difficulty as something that should be valued.
cyberdeck 101
If you've ever watched The Matrix, Blade Runner, or Ghost in the Shell and seen that device they're typing on, you've already met a cyberdeck. The aesthetic lives in cyberpunk fiction: chunky, modular, DIY-looking computers built for people who exist outside of whatever the mainstream is offering.
They are custom-built portable computers made from essential computing elements (Raspberry Pi, keyboard, screen) and then literally anything else. The nostalgic aesthetic of the early 2000s digital era heavily influences these creations as cyberdecks are built into polly pocket homes, purses (shaped like clam-shells), brooch cases, pokemon cases, lunch boxes, JOLLIBEE BOXES!!! The opportunities are ENDLESS!
And as to what they do? The question should be what can’t they do? The raspberry pis can be programmed to do (almost) anything. From mini MP3 players; reading devices; e-ink art displays; tamagotchis to help your plant survive; audio journals; and even cameras! They purposely live separate from your existing devices for people who want to take back control of their screens, without ads or without other distracting features.
“This is ‘renewed tech’, meaning that, in my mind, it centers around discovery, agency, and exploration. Cyberdecks don’t need to inherently justify ourselves—and nor do humans, for that matter.”
(if you still don’t get it, watch this, and this, and this)
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women in stem
What’s especially fascinating about this movement is that it’s being driven by the internet girlies. (Not that they invented cyberdecks, this has been a niche hobby for years). But women leading this revival says something specific. There’s a hunger there, for whimsy in tech, for making things with your hands, for taking back some control over the devices that run our lives.
One part of that hunger is about grief. Grief for the promise of a future that never happened. The design of gadgets made in 2000s, with their transparent or colorful design, clunky, space like, otherworldly seemed to suggest that there would be infinite possibilities made with tech. Instead everything got flattened. Optimised. The genuine sense that the future could look like anything, got quietly replaced by the same handful of products, doing the same things, nudging us in the same directions.
The cyberdecks reach back toward that feeling. Not out of pure nostalgia, but out of a genuine frustration with what we ended up with instead. A Polly Pocket computer isn’t just cute, it’s a refusal. It’s someone wanting tech that’s surprising and personal and a little bit ridiculous, instead of the alternative of the hyper-optimised rectangle and we have enough of those.
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Because honestly, we are exhausted. Countless offline hangouts , analog trends and the uptake of crafting hobbies are proof of this. We’re exhausted by an internet that is increasingly structured around keeping us on it, spending on it, optimising our lives for it. And we are soooo increasingly aware of how depressing it is, to give our digital lives to a handful of platforms, and pay rent in the form of our attention and data. Building your own computer is a small but real act of opting out of that.
cyberdeckies supporting cyberdeckies!!! (wlw)
As I started seeing more and more of the girlies building their decks, I noticed something that made my heart very warm. The comments sections of these videos are full of people helping each other. Asking questions and actually getting answers. Sharing resources. Even cheering each other on.
Besides people wanting to build their own tech, people were trying to actively decentralise together. They weren’t waiting for a platform to give them the tools, not waiting for permission, but figuring it out collectively and in the open. Tech literacy is no longer something being gatekept by a specific type of person in a specific type of space. It’s being passed around freely, in the comments of a video of a girl building a computer inside a pokemon case.
As one writer puts it:
“An unforeseen benefit of turning cyberdecks into girly pop accessories is the education of women in both hardware and software systems. Reddit users particularly love the rebellious nature and opportunity to learn that a cyberdeck build presents. But, the Harvard Business Review has documented the known gap in AI usage between men and women, threatening their career growth and leading to the majority of large language models being trained by male audiences. I blended these two together in my Vitamix brain and have decided that the opportunity to learn is the for the greater good. And here is every woman’s opportunity for total creative freedom while closing the AI knowledge gap! You choose the aesthetic, the application, the access. This is what Sam Altman denies you.”
There is also the other side of the comments. The ones calling female builders performative. Suggesting they don’t really understand what they’re building, that they’re doing it for attention, that it’s aesthetic over substance. Which, aside from being exhausting, says a lot. This isn't new. Tech has always had a way of making women feel like they don't belong in it, from the erasure of early female programmers to the very recent culture wars in gaming. The comments on ubeboobey's videos are just the latest version of a very old pattern. When women build things it's a performance. When men do the same, it's innovation. But the women leading this wave are building anyway, visibly and joyfully, and that is how things change.
the rise of techno joy
This isn’t just a micro universe. Cyberdecks are part of something broader, people using technology as a canvas for creativity rather than just a service they consume. Building things that wouldn’t exist otherwise, that nobody asked for, that aren’t made to scale, that exist purely because someone wanted them to.
You see it everywhere once you’re looking. A girl who coded a system to control her vocal production using her hands and brainwave detector through Touch Designer. None of these things are being made to be scale or pitched to investors. Someone had an idea about creating something and figured out how to make it real, which is a more radical act than it sounds in an era where we are handed finished products, with no knowledge about how they are made and told to consume them.
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This is technical frictionmaxxing. Building your own computer from salvaged parts is pushback against optimisation. The hours spent figuring it out are not a bug, they are what gives the thing meaning that a downloaded app never could.
“Applying this to the era of generative A.I., Campbell and colleagues had some participants in a study use ChatGPT to complete a writing assignment, and had some forgo help from the tool. The results clearly pointed to writers walking away with greater feelings of satisfaction and competency, as well as a more meaningful connection to their output, when they worked through the craft without A.I. assistance.”
let’s be less bot
E-waste is also an important element here too. We live in a world where our devices are designed to be replaced, with the opening up of our phones actively discouraged and sometimes literally engineered out of possibility. Building a computer from salvaged or repurposed parts is a small but real refusal of that logic. It is anti-waste, it is anti-dependence, and it is also, crucially, more fun.
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As with any upward adoption of a movement, the original philosophies tend to become lost. As people rush to build their own decks, some are turning to Amazon and Temu for parts, and the comments have noticed (can anything ever be exempt from consumerism?) Cyberdeck philosophy promotes building from things you already have: salvaged, repurposed, found. The whole point is that it is anti-waste, anti-dependence, a refusal of the same consumer logic that gave us the sleek black rectangle in the first place. Whether that holds as the trend grows is another question, and honestly, a pretty telling one.
Underneath it all though, the e-waste, consumerism creep, is something more interesting. The fact there is a movement towards understanding how our technology works, and how its being built. This kind of tech literacy gives me a little hope for a society that is harder to manipulate and harder to monetise. Maybe we aren’t all robots after all.
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read more
The return of personalised tech and how to build a cyberdeck
Slate on We made technology too easy to use: “These objects demand something of the user; and in demanding it, they engage us in a way that feels lost in our era of digital interfaces”
Raspberry Pi on The celebration of cyberdecks
Quasa on Cyberpunk is already here: “Building a cyberdeck is quietly rebellious. It’s self-defense and nostalgia at the same time.”
Cyberdeck Cafe on What is a Cyberdeck: “Like building a custom desktop tower PC a Cyberdeck is all about giving you total control over every piece that goes into your portable computing device and just like that gaming rig with all its lights, engraved panels, meticulously laid out wiring and water cooling tubes every Cyberdeck’s design should be given the same consideration.”
I am so flattered that you quoted me here! The Rise of the Hot Girl Cyberdeck has been my most successful post on Substack. This is my first cross link!
Love this perspective. Technology becomes much more meaningful when people build, experiment, and share their own experiences instead of just consuming whatever big platforms give them.
The same idea applies to education. Students should also have access to real experiences from other students—which is why communities like RateMyProfessors.org are so valuable.