GoKawiilUbe Boobey’s bedroom is slightly messy after a trip to Morocco, but her cyberdeck glistens among the clutter. The homemade computer is located inside a clamshell purse, covered in swirly gold accents and filled with pearls, with some makeup and fake moss tucked beneath the keyboard. The 22-year-old, who’s based in London and has worked as a model, designed it to look like a fantastical mermaid’s laptop that just washed ashore.
The TikTok creator, whose real name is Annike Tan, unveiled her very first build in March with a video partially captioned “fuck it. cunty cyberdeck.” In that TikTok, she puts the hardware together and shows off the frilly details, like a custom mouse covered in gold jump rings. Since that post, over 32 million viewers have watched her videos about DIY tech projects; it’s one data point among many that highlights a renewed interest in cyberdecks, especially among women eager to share their creations online.
Annike Tan started documenting her DIY builds on TikTok earlier this year. COURTESY OF ANNIKE TAN
These cyberdecks are more than just a trendy craft project going viral on social media. The DIY gadget is, in part, a rejection of our current moment, dominated by the predictable flatness of generative AI and minimalist, mass-produced devices. “What we should do with cyberdecks is gatekeep them from AI and megacorp,” Tan says in a TikTok video with nearly 4 million views.
The concept of a cyberdeck is decades old, but the idea has always had an antiestablishment bent. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, an influential sci-fi novel released in 1984, the protagonist is a data thief who uses his deck, which jacks into his brain, to hack big corporations: “He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.”