Cyberdecks are having a moment, rejecting big tech surveillance with style and substance

When I reach out to the self-proclaimed “open source baddie” CC for an interview, I’m pretty sure she’s emailing me back from a pink mermaid purse. “I’m just having so much fun,” she tells me about her seashell cyberdeck . “It’s a Tamagotchi. It’s also an e-reader. It’s networked to my vault and my servers, so it has access to all of my server data, which has all my PDFs, and books, and notes, and everything… It’s also connected to my local AI setup at home.” CC has no background in software engineering or computer science, but she’s gotten good enough at building unconventional cyberdecks — small DIY computers — that she documents the process on her blog Bimbo Tech so that other women can follow her lead, even if they don’t yet know what RAM is. The idea of the cyberdeck originated in William Gibson’s 1984 sci-fi novel “Neuromancer,” and when credit card-sized computers like the Raspberry Pi came on the market in the 2010s, hardware enthusiasts began building and sharing their own cyberdecks in niche online communities. But over the last few months, these communities have exploded in popularity thanks to women on social media who are teaching each other to build artistic, hyper-feminine computers by documenting their building processes. “I have a running joke that there’s this underlying misogyny in tech — because whenever they release a pro model, or an elite model… I’m always like, let me guess, it’s black or silver,” CC said. …