The cyberdeck is, at its most basic, a homemade computer built to look like something a fictional hacker would carry in 1984. That it exists at all is largely the fault of novelist William Gibson.
In Neuromancer, published that year, protagonist Henry Dorsett Case uses a custom cyberspace deck to project his consciousness into the matrix. Gibson was writing speculative fiction. Forty years later, a twenty-something on TikTok named Annika Tan, who goes by ‘ubeboobey’, built a working computer inside an old purse and posted it to 224,500 followers. The video has millions of views. The gap between those two facts says something about where we are.
A cyberdeck can be almost anything. Most builders start with a single-board computer, typically a Raspberry Pi, and work outward: a small screen, a keyboard, a battery, some kind of enclosure. The enclosure is where it gets interesting.
Tan’s mermaid-themed build, which drew significant press coverage in outlets including Wired and The Cut, hides its components inside a handbag. Others used Pelican cases, 3D-printed shells, gutted vintage electronics, or whatever was closest. The Cyberdeck Cafe, which functions as a loose community hub, lists hundreds of documented builds. No two look alike.
The uses are less exotic than the aesthetic implies. Writing, note-taking, basic programming, and network scanning for those with a cybersecurity background. YouTuber DTeK, who has over 572,000 subscribers, built a multi-function backup computer that has been watched 4.6 million times. It is, essentially, a rugged portable PC in an unusual box. Practical, not science fiction.
What the cyberpunk genre actually contributed is permission. The aesthetic, borrowed from Blade Runner and its descendants, presents technology as improvised, grimy, and personal rather than sleek and corporate. That framing turns a Raspberry Pi into a thrifted jewellery box into a statement rather than a botched prototype. The r/cyberDeck subreddit, with 52,000 weekly visitors, is full of people who have taken that permission seriously.
There is also something plainly reactive about the trend. Mass-produced laptops have converged on a design language so uniform that most consumers cannot identify their own machine in a lineup. Every major manufacturer is selling the same thin aluminium rectangle with the same chicklet keyboard and the same rounded corners. The cyberdeck community has noticed. Building your own device is, among other things, a refusal.
Whether that refusal amounts to anything beyond a hobby is a different question. Most people are not going to solder a keyboard to a Raspberry Pi when they can buy a laptop that works the first time. The cyberdeck will remain what it has always been: a niche with good optics and a surprisingly active subreddit. Gibson probably did not see that coming either.
