Cyberdecks offer a creative escape from Silicon Valley homogeneity

Cyberdecks—small, do-it-yourself (DIY) computers—are seeing a surge in popularity as users reject big tech surveillance. The concept originated in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. While hardware enthusiasts began building devices in the 2010s when credit card-sized computers like the Raspberry Pi arrived, the community has exploded over the last few months as creators design highly personalized, artistic machines.

For many builders, these projects push back against what blogger CC describes as an “underlying misogyny in tech” regarding product design. CC, who documents her builds on her blog Bimbo Tech, notes that consumer devices from companies like Apple and Meta lack aesthetic variety, limiting high-end models to black or silver. By building their own devices, creators bypass the restrictive ecosystems of $1,000 commercial phones that lose their warranties if modified. “I don’t want Meta AI glasses. I want to pirate books in a tiny embellished shell,” said TikTok creator Sarahbelle Kim, who notes that these builds allow users to avoid surveillance by sourcing basic parts from thrift stores or eBay.

Some builders are connecting modern hardware to the history of fiber art. Maro Vardanyan, a blockchain developer and fiber artist, creates “macrame motherboards” by weaving Raspberry Pi computers into wearable items. Vardanyan notes that early computers relied on handwoven magnetic-core memory—early computer memory made of copper wiring—which was meticulously threaded by female textile workers to encode the 1s and 0s of binary code for NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer. When her work went viral, she faced technical skepticism from online critics regarding the durability of her builds and the electrical conductivity of her general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins—the general-purpose input/output pins on a computer board. Vardanyan addressed these concerns by preserving the hardware in an acrylic shell and using conductive thread to ensure the devices remain fully functional.

Despite facing “condescending men on the internet” who dismiss these hyper-feminine builds, creators view their work as a necessary rejection of Silicon Valley culture and its obsession with optimization. This corporate culture of efficiency—which has made trends like unregulated Chinese peptide injections popular—stands in contrast to the deliberately impractical, creative process of building a personalized cyberdeck. For these builders, taking hardware customization into their own hands is a way to reclaim agency. Vardanyan recalled that ten years ago, she would walk into a tech conference with only three girls present, where people assumed she was on the marketing team. Today, she finds it refreshing to see a growing community of women online educating each other on hardware and software.

Why it matters

The rise of these personalized devices represents a tangible rejection of the homogeneity and surveillance inherent in big tech, empowering users to reclaim agency over their hardware.