I read the article and sadly I think the author missed a key thing that is going on.
Yes, there are few people who created cyberdecks as a counter-culture, anti-company tool (which is a lot of what the author argues).
But some of the newer ones they highlight are nothing more than engagement farming reels. They are the very definition of the opposite of what the author writes here:
> We want to escape the algorithmic plantations that tech companies have herded us into.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
Are you sure this isn’t just because it’s the “wrong” people who are building them? Instead of the typical (older) FOSS/geek/whatever crowd?
It feels overly negative to me. People, mostly younger people, are building them, tinkering with them and are excited to post about them. Is it any surprise they’re doing so on TikTok or wherever? Yes, it’s a little ironic considering the anti-big-tech vibes mentioned in the article, but is it any different from when our lot were posting to Google+ etc?
I don’t know, this feels like a good thing to me, and something we should encourage. The more people playing and experimenting with tech rather than passively consuming the better.
If I was a teenager again today I like to think I’d be hacking one of these together.
There's nothing particularly technologically counterculture or transgressive about running a stock Raspberry Pi using stock Raspberry Pi OS or, worse, an x86 PC. If anything, it's a mirror of the modern world: a garish, tasteless surface layer of individuality concealing conformity and helpless dependence on "the man" within.
Bunnie Huang's Precursor project was a genuine act of rebellion against the locked down nature of modern computing. These cyberdecks are tacky cosplay accessories for adults.
Nah, it's not "the wrong people" but "the wrong purpose" with the purpose being no purpose or rather just "looking good on social media".
Which, don't get me wrong, is generally fine, because not everything has to be functional, art is important, bla bla bla.
Problem however is when the algorithm gets involved and "being not part of the mainstream" becomes a mainstream metric to optimize for.
This feels like that, and - as it often has happened - it weaponizes the usual stuff to defend itself.
Which we do not want, because the stuff it weaponizes is actually important, so it should not be tainted by the big value extraction machine in the cloud.
So basically, when punk music goes becomes mainstream so its no longer counter culture, it is part of the culture. In a way you could say that mainstream culture is very good at "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".
I think I'd over indexed on the unfinished look of some of them, but relooking at them as prototypes instead of the level of the original set makes them seem more reasonable.
Most of the cyberdecks you see, though, are just cosmetic variations on "raspi in a pelican case". Some of those cosmetic variations are definitely impressive, but the guts are mostly the same between builds. The guy who 3D-printed a bespoke case to make it look like it was off the set of The Martian did an amazing job, but it's still just a raspberry pi, a display, and a USB mechanical keyboard, less interesting from a technical perspective than the one that's more or less the same, but using a beer can speaker and an 18V drill battery as a power supply, but again still just a raspi.
While there are definitely a few notable builds that involved actually-interesting technical problem solving, I think most cyberdecks make more sense through the lens of physical concept art exploring what a rugged or perhaps ultra-personalized personal computer can be.
I just clicked the page and then noted that the very first visual example under the header "What is a Cyberdeck?" was a TikTok embed that I can't view because it claims to be a private TikTok (and I have no idea if that's actually the case or if my local adblocking is somehow screwing up the TikTok embed). But the broader problem is that whoever made the thing found it useful to post about it on a social media platform run by a large Chinese corporation, that probably all their relevant peer group uses. I think it's unlikely that they care that I can't see their content because TikTok is broken for me (or they set it private for a reason). Regardless of what hardware they build, they are not meaningfully escaping from corporate-controlled tech.
Agree. Any hobby can become superficial content for Instagram, especially if your only or main source of information is online channels. But real communities exist, and you need to be in the real world to experience them firsthand.
I think both sides are true. Of course, there's a certain irony in proclaiming one's escape from the yoke of Big Tech on the very Big Tech platforms one claims to be escaping.
It's also telling that the most popular videos are about building the most visually striking Cyberdecks and not about building what a Cyberdeck is actually useful for—that's what gets engagement on short-form video platforms.
But I think it's a massively positive thing overall:
-Women, LGBTQ folks, and other underrepresented groups are finding their way to these nerdier hobbies.
-People are getting tired of technology taking over their lives, specifically attention economy and surveillance tech.
-People are learning about electronics and understanding that there are other ways of doing things.
I fail to see the negative in this. Even if none of these cyberdecks are used for practical purposes, someone learned something new. And, even if their cyberdeck gathers dust, being conscious of their tech usage might change how they use their MacBook or the internet more generally.
I think what you're saying is a bit like criticizing someone for not being a self-sustaining farmer because they only grew their own vegetables one summer and then quit.
They may not only eat their own vegetables, but that experience may lead to them buying from farmer's markets vs. Big Food. And that's a net positive.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
There is. "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
Freeing yourself from the social media is definitely doable. Depending on how firmly engaged you are at the moment, it can vary in difficulty between fait accompli and moderately challenging. It's obviously possible for anyone to do themselves.
Liberating the masses? Morpheus said it best:
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
> "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
I don't think this is a point the author spoke about at all.
To crudely summarize what I think their claim is: Cyberdecks are an anti-big tech creation. They are spreading outside traditional hackers and the proof is these reels.
My claim is that cyberdecks are not spreading, and instead those reels is just evidence that (a) people will mine all subcultures for topics that they can create views from and (b) the author themselves is enabling this behavior.
They are spreading but the tech bro forums, as always, hate it. Make your case creative and not another grey 3d printed case? You'll either get ignored or condescended to.
Post your creation on a social channel not dominated by white bros?
You are fake, a culture miner and engagement farming.
See the post above for a textbook way of rejecting anyone who isn't a white tech bro.
I wrote the above post. I like the creative cases!
But maybe you are right and it isn't just engagement mining. I think my problem is more that I'm comparing the level of finish on the original cyberdecks to these ones, and they don't compare well.
But perhaps I should be thinking of these as prototype level ones.
(It's also very valid to point out the original ones were so well finished because they were engagement mining too)
If I listen to X band. Watch Y film. Am I doing it purely for myself or have I been prodded by society in some way?
Am I a 'real' fan of band X, or not, because I only got into them with there latest hit album?
This isn't a new thing. Niche thing becomes popular. Fans of niche thing try to gate keep.
My biggest critique would be that the author doesn't realise the 'algorithmic plantation' they are in. The only cyberdecks I've seen are made by white men. Not trans and black people.
Further I don't even think it's about cyberdecks per se. That's the in thing. Before that it was neo pixels or whatever. People like to make things, and people are influenced by others. The cyberdecks isn't the counter cultural element. It's the making of whatever that is. Cyberdecks are just the latest thing.
My opinion is somewhat that the last "real" cyberdeck was the Hackberry Pi, which is essentially the Blackberry I always wanted and that they never produced. Due to it being fully open, there's an insane amount of 3d printing community overlap, where people share their upgrades, designs, modifications and customizations.
Raspberry Pi as a platform has revolutionized access to computers in my opinion, though since the RAM crisis started not so much anymore due to the insane price differences. But the Hackberry is the computing device where I think it has lots of potential for being my actual "Linux on the go" that I wanted but never got ... for the last 15(?) years waiting for it.
I recently got a (good!) 3D printer, and that combined with Claude has got me building lots of custom hardware devices using ESP32s.
I don't really see the value in a full-computer experience (which seems to be what most cyberdecks try to do - badly) but I can see utility in "sidecar"-style hardware, which is more akin to a phone app but with a better experience because of custom hardware.
Any chance you have or could post pics of those custom HA controllers? Seeing custom interactables and how they integrate with ppl's environments are always suuuuper interesting
I love the fit and finish on the case. Neat to just one shot little control panels like that. Have you thought about making more? Context sensitive based on the room or activity in that area?
Currently it's mostly a case of building them to solve specific problems, and I don't really have much else I need. This one controls my temperature and lighting for when I don't want to pick up my phone.
Something I've been doing is making an automated hydroponic tent. Temp, humidity, EC sensors and a few servos to control nutrients all feed into an esp32 + servo controller and broadcast data through a local webapp. Just need to add a camera for timelapses and remote viewing.
What keeps going through my mind regarding this topic is that we have Instagram for pictures, YouTube for videos, Reddit as a forum, Twitter/Bsky as a microblogging service, and so on. But what if we focused on locality again? What if each city/region had its own virtual meeting place for pictures, videos, forums, microblogging, and so forth? I don't mean a "super app" that simply divides things regionally, but rather that each regional center builds its own Hangout.
I realize that this sounds fantastical, and I don't know how something like that could be implemented in the current situation. It's more the idea that while Facebook and similar platforms allow us to see content from people all over the world, we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
> we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
Exactly, and the local layer is actually were we as normal people have the most power of participation, opportunity to find consensus and act together for the overall common (local) good. And the beautiful emergent side-effect is that this local good turns automatically into a global good if it's approached locally from the bottom up.
Side-note: The (global) commercial news industry is very contra-productive to actual useful action: by reporting 24/7 almost only negative out-of-reach quick changing 'news' that people can't possible resolve in any way by their own, has as effect the entrapment of cynicism that keeps people from doing local community action. This inertia is of course very welcome by the few conglomerates that run the world and rather would like seeing you in despair and inactive while patching over the real issues with cheap consumerism they also conveniently provide.
Study after study shows that the only real antidote to this despair is local-action: bounding together with others and doing positive tangible things on the local level.
I live in a village with 2.000 people and about 25 common Whatsapp channels. And it is hell. Sometimes, you really don't want to interact with your neighbors beyond the courtesy "hello". These people don't have anything in common with you, other than your coordinates on the map. That's no basis for a functional community in the online sense.
Exactly."Local only" sounds like a good idea to people who were born after the internet turned us all into a global village. People who remember bulletin board systems that were mostly limited to your own area code often have a different take.
To me, it feels like we already tried not being able to talk to people who were far away from us once already, and what it did was lead to cultures dominated by the most popular view. Uncommon and unpopular voices were marginalized to the edges (at best - sometimes they were met with violence and bullying) and often ignored completely. If you were on the fringe, you either didn't have anyone to talk to or had to befriend the one other person within 25 miles with a similar quirk.
Is it bad that the internet has amplified the voices of every fringe group to ridiculous volumes? Sure. On the other hand, people in the US people use the terms "black neighborhood" and "white neighborhood"? That's what staying local gets you. Local only was gross then, and it's gross now.
This might be more about whatsapp poor organisation tools, the general need for private ML-based smart indexing/notifications and efforts at structured community building.
Local social is one of the most attempted startup ideas of the 2010s. It is quite challenging because network effects are hard to reach at the local scale, and you need significant moderation to prevent bullying.
A big issue is the NextDoor effect. The most prolific posters are going to be people who saw a black person walking around and are startled by it and posting about it. Sane people see that and leave.
Yes, I see scaling as the biggest problem. Instead of developing one service for potentially 7 billion users, you're building 10 services for maybe 1 to 10 million users each. It would probably come down to patching together open-source solutions like Keycloak, Immich, FreeTube, Flarum, etc. I find atproto, on which Bluesky/Eurosky are based, particularly interesting.
I'm not so sure whether bullying is really a big problem. In such a regional environment, it makes little sense to appear "anonymous." You might not want your name and address publicly available, but if you comment on the popular parties and clubs, neighborhood happenings, etc., people who know you in real life will naturally recognize you. Ultimately, it comes down to how the local population operates.
> we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
Almost every larger city has a more or less active subreddit these days, on platforms like Twitter you can look what people post with a city name tag. And then there are Mastodon and Lemmy/Piefed with instances for geographic regions.
Local subreddits I follow have taken an absolute nosedive. They got astroturfed hard in recent election cycles and most people who are still left on their posting are people who legitimately need to go and touch grass. Everything is a 10 alarm crisis. No one actually understands anything beyond a baity headline interpretation of whatever issue is at hand. Have a benign opinion like "I actually think our city is pretty walkable as it is and I enjoy walking around" and you are met with downvotes and pitchforks for going against the narrative that everything is terrible and you should be shut inside. God forbid you indicate you have been biking around town without 1100 miles of bike lane being constructed first. You will get lectured and talked down for having wrong opinion.
Been working on a handheld cyberdeck with a good thumb keyboard. I'm masochistic enough to write entire projects on my smartphone with vim running inside termux, so I think anything that improves on this will certainly be used.
Measured my thumb's swiping arc and designed a split keyboard specifically for my hands. Managed to get every symbol in there with no layers. Now I just need to save up some money and order protypes so I can get a feel for the switches. Can't move forward until I've perfected the keyboard.
For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.
I'm imagining a computer set up for DJing with big-ass speakers on the outside top lid, and a bunch of analog controls on either side of the keyboard, and a heavy battery.
That's not only possible, but was done to death in the early 2000s during the heyday of car audio components, "home theater" PCs, iPods, and finally good enough laptops.
If you built one of those you were automatically the DJ after school, at the skate park, etc. You better believe those SLA batteries were heavy.
> "For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment."
Any real world examples? I don't think that's plausible from a RFI, power, heat, or just plain fragility perspective even with the cheapo hobbyist instruments suitable for kitbashing and only energizing a couple of instruments a time.
Idk if it merits being called a cyberdeck, but i use my rickety suitcase tablet+keyboard+mouse (+ powerbank) setup which I VNC from to my house computers mainly. One of the reasons is local LLMs being often impractical to run directly in my laptop, especially as I also do other things. Before that I didn't use it as much. Sometimes I just put the laptop and the mouse in the suitcase, mainly because I find the trackpad virtually unusable for VNC, particularly for copy-paste.
I got a ClockworkPi uConsole and am not really using it much, and that’s because it’s become very hard for me to read on the high dpi small screen for too long.
The two non computer device I use today are my digital audio player (DAP) and my ereader. If I have the time and money, that would be the kind of specialized tasks that I could design a cyberdeck towards. The laptop form factor is quite nice for computing although I would like more direct ports than USB which is complex for experimentation.
GPD makes several devices that come close to the old compact Vaios. I have the GPD Win Mini and it's a pretty capable machine - 32GB RAM, 2TB storage, RDNA 3.5 gfx, built-in gamepad, full set of ports.
The keyboard is surprisingly usable, although of course nowhere close to that of a laptop, but still usable for short periods. I got a fully fleshed out Arch gaming setup (manual install) and I use it on a regular basis like a Steam Deck and just a portable dev/test machine at work.
I always wanted one of the tiny form factor laptops but during that period I had a specific need for a real non-usb hardware serial port and instead bought a laptop that actually had one which was very strange (2009 maybe?)
I think these things are interesting, but I grew up on neuromancer...and so I have some cognitive dissonance when I see these described as cyberdecks and see screens.
I get that the term has moved on, and cyberdeck means whatever people say it means now. But to me, these are just novel retro diy laptops. I think given today's technology you could sort of a approximate a cyberdeck with some low end ar/vr glasses like something from xreal and ditch the screen.
that's why I still love the quest3, just for the potential. but xreal makes more sense, and then a more open platform. but I think post-covid we approach neuromancer more than ever.
At CCCamp 2023 was someone showing off how they converted a laptop with a broken screen into a cyberdeck by removing the screen and permanently connecting the bottom half to VR glasses.
There was also a musical Tesla coil. And some group called Anderstorp, who converted a massive obsolete router into a beer tap.
Unfortunately getting that as elective surgery is impossible in the developed world and the quality of Brazilian back alley brain surgery leaves a lot to be desired.
"Yeah I don't get it..." meanwhile me packing for holiday with my GrapheneOS Pixel with my 3D printed phone stand and my BT mechanical keyboard "Wait a minute!"
Also gave a workshop last weekends to kids and brought a "server" as a RPi Zero and a cheap (as in goodie level) tiny battery.
At the end of the day, the very system you claim to oppose will ultimately profit from this "movement."
I am not trying to look down on a hobby. Building cyberdecks is cool, and it's a great learning experience, but it's not a movement.
Other than being a fun project, a cyberdeck serves no practical purpose and lacks any real daily driving application. It sparks no actual rebellion. it's just a product not the revolution. but i wish it was, i genuinely wish people would just show the finger to big corporations.
Was it? According to whom? The quoted phrase is pretty much a meme at this point, but I don't think it's true. This would suggest people in the 80s and 90s were sitting around feeling lonely and isolated, wishing they could be "more connected".
Technology has always been about one thing: giving people more freedom. Whether it's the ability to make coffee at home, or travel vast distances at great speeds whenever you want to, it's all about people being free from the constraints of relying on society (and the environment) for things.
It's all fundamentally counter to a cohesive society. It was never going to make us "more connected", quite the contrary. Asimov saw where this was going half a century ago. In his books the Solarians took technology to the extreme, allowing them to live alone on enormous estates affording them all the freedom in the world. But they were alone, communicating only remotely through screens. They didn't even have sex any more. Sound familiar?
When I read this as a teen it totally put me off "freedom" as the singular goal so many people treat it as. I didn't want to end up like that. I don't want to be alone. Life is about sharing and technology is never going to help with that, it's only going to make it worse, if we let it.
> This is apparent in the rise of "journal tok", where people on TikTok are posting about returning to written journals, planners, and sketchbooks.
Is this intended to be ironic? People will do anything for views on TikTok, including making videos about not using TikTok. If anyone does anything and puts it on TikTok, or other social media, I assume they're doing it for the views, not because they actually enjoy it. If you want to find someone who enjoys cooking, find someone who will cook and eat with you, don't look on TikTok. If you want to find someone who doesn't like TikTok, well, guess where you won't find them.
The rest of the article is filled with TikTok videos which I'm not going to watch.
This! Its learning and a rite of passage, like with ‘guilds’ / the arts and crafts movements / craftsmanship described in the article (but not discussed as far as i can see). Sorry forgot the name for this thing… basically a master / apprentice project.
Very compelling read on how common people cooperatives were always the only counterweight to the ruling class - and how the elites constantly tried to polarise the common people to take power from them.
> The Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, and our current Techno-Fudalist time are all connected. We still have lords (land lords, the bourgeoisie), we still have kings who enclose the commons (billionaires who enclosed the commons of the internet), who enforce violence with the hand of private armies of knights (the police and military), who demand that we provide for them while they subjugate us.
Medieval Guilds & The Arts and Crafts movement
> Medieval guilds were created during feudal times as a challenge to the labor exploitation of the working class of the time. In some areas, guilds were organized by specific crafts. Metalsmithing, woodworking, and textiles are some examples. Guilds had specific guidelines on quality, and they created widespread quality control over the goods produced by the artisans in the guild. If a woodworker produced bad-quality furniture, their guild could basically force them to remake it to their quality standards.
> Guilds were basically worker cooperatives (in some cases) or could be thought of as trade-specific labor unions
> I say that cyberdecks are having another wave of resurgence because the interest in cyberdecks waxes and wanes, like everything in life, there is a cycle to the ideas coming into focus and out of focus, washing into the shore and washing back out to the sea of etheral thought.
> In my own view, cyberdecks have remained popular because of hacker culture. And all of the cultural norms wrapped up in hacker subcultures carries along with it. Specifically, the design of cyberdecks over the years has maintained a steady state of projects that maintain a military or scientific bend to them. They are afterall, influenced by science fiction about dystopian future societies that focus on war, dystopian corporate megacities, or interstellar travel.
The whole piece feel like vibe farming by some youngling piecing together part of the hacker culture as seen by the media in the 90s with some reddit or vintage tumblr trends on top. I resonated with a lot of themes it tries to capture but it ends up looking more like a teen trying to commodify a subculture in a performative way rather than a real tentative alternative to the system, as we saw every generation or so.
I'm all in for lowtech, degrowth, permacomputing, Bookchin municipalism and Illich like "tools for conviviality" but here it seems.. candid and non genuine.
I read the article and sadly I think the author missed a key thing that is going on.
Yes, there are few people who created cyberdecks as a counter-culture, anti-company tool (which is a lot of what the author argues).
But some of the newer ones they highlight are nothing more than engagement farming reels. They are the very definition of the opposite of what the author writes here:
> We want to escape the algorithmic plantations that tech companies have herded us into.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
Are you sure this isn’t just because it’s the “wrong” people who are building them? Instead of the typical (older) FOSS/geek/whatever crowd?
It feels overly negative to me. People, mostly younger people, are building them, tinkering with them and are excited to post about them. Is it any surprise they’re doing so on TikTok or wherever? Yes, it’s a little ironic considering the anti-big-tech vibes mentioned in the article, but is it any different from when our lot were posting to Google+ etc?
I don’t know, this feels like a good thing to me, and something we should encourage. The more people playing and experimenting with tech rather than passively consuming the better.
If I was a teenager again today I like to think I’d be hacking one of these together.
There's nothing particularly technologically counterculture or transgressive about running a stock Raspberry Pi using stock Raspberry Pi OS or, worse, an x86 PC. If anything, it's a mirror of the modern world: a garish, tasteless surface layer of individuality concealing conformity and helpless dependence on "the man" within.
Bunnie Huang's Precursor project was a genuine act of rebellion against the locked down nature of modern computing. These cyberdecks are tacky cosplay accessories for adults.
Nah, it's not "the wrong people" but "the wrong purpose" with the purpose being no purpose or rather just "looking good on social media".
Which, don't get me wrong, is generally fine, because not everything has to be functional, art is important, bla bla bla. Problem however is when the algorithm gets involved and "being not part of the mainstream" becomes a mainstream metric to optimize for.
This feels like that, and - as it often has happened - it weaponizes the usual stuff to defend itself. Which we do not want, because the stuff it weaponizes is actually important, so it should not be tainted by the big value extraction machine in the cloud.
So basically, when punk music goes becomes mainstream so its no longer counter culture, it is part of the culture. In a way you could say that mainstream culture is very good at "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".
Read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein.
It basically explains this mechanism in great detail.
A good book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
Hmm perhaps you are right.
I think I'd over indexed on the unfinished look of some of them, but relooking at them as prototypes instead of the level of the original set makes them seem more reasonable.
Most of the cyberdecks you see, though, are just cosmetic variations on "raspi in a pelican case". Some of those cosmetic variations are definitely impressive, but the guts are mostly the same between builds. The guy who 3D-printed a bespoke case to make it look like it was off the set of The Martian did an amazing job, but it's still just a raspberry pi, a display, and a USB mechanical keyboard, less interesting from a technical perspective than the one that's more or less the same, but using a beer can speaker and an 18V drill battery as a power supply, but again still just a raspi.
While there are definitely a few notable builds that involved actually-interesting technical problem solving, I think most cyberdecks make more sense through the lens of physical concept art exploring what a rugged or perhaps ultra-personalized personal computer can be.
I just clicked the page and then noted that the very first visual example under the header "What is a Cyberdeck?" was a TikTok embed that I can't view because it claims to be a private TikTok (and I have no idea if that's actually the case or if my local adblocking is somehow screwing up the TikTok embed). But the broader problem is that whoever made the thing found it useful to post about it on a social media platform run by a large Chinese corporation, that probably all their relevant peer group uses. I think it's unlikely that they care that I can't see their content because TikTok is broken for me (or they set it private for a reason). Regardless of what hardware they build, they are not meaningfully escaping from corporate-controlled tech.
Agree. Any hobby can become superficial content for Instagram, especially if your only or main source of information is online channels. But real communities exist, and you need to be in the real world to experience them firsthand.
Not arguing that real communities don't exist!
I'm arguing that the author's main point is based on the Instagram posts, and this is invalid.
I think both sides are true. Of course, there's a certain irony in proclaiming one's escape from the yoke of Big Tech on the very Big Tech platforms one claims to be escaping.
It's also telling that the most popular videos are about building the most visually striking Cyberdecks and not about building what a Cyberdeck is actually useful for—that's what gets engagement on short-form video platforms.
But I think it's a massively positive thing overall:
-Women, LGBTQ folks, and other underrepresented groups are finding their way to these nerdier hobbies.
-People are getting tired of technology taking over their lives, specifically attention economy and surveillance tech.
-People are learning about electronics and understanding that there are other ways of doing things.
I fail to see the negative in this. Even if none of these cyberdecks are used for practical purposes, someone learned something new. And, even if their cyberdeck gathers dust, being conscious of their tech usage might change how they use their MacBook or the internet more generally.
I think what you're saying is a bit like criticizing someone for not being a self-sustaining farmer because they only grew their own vegetables one summer and then quit.
They may not only eat their own vegetables, but that experience may lead to them buying from farmer's markets vs. Big Food. And that's a net positive.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
There is. "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
Freeing yourself from the social media is definitely doable. Depending on how firmly engaged you are at the moment, it can vary in difficulty between fait accompli and moderately challenging. It's obviously possible for anyone to do themselves.
Liberating the masses? Morpheus said it best:
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
> "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
I don't think this is a point the author spoke about at all.
To crudely summarize what I think their claim is: Cyberdecks are an anti-big tech creation. They are spreading outside traditional hackers and the proof is these reels.
My claim is that cyberdecks are not spreading, and instead those reels is just evidence that (a) people will mine all subcultures for topics that they can create views from and (b) the author themselves is enabling this behavior.
They are spreading but the tech bro forums, as always, hate it. Make your case creative and not another grey 3d printed case? You'll either get ignored or condescended to.
Post your creation on a social channel not dominated by white bros?
You are fake, a culture miner and engagement farming.
See the post above for a textbook way of rejecting anyone who isn't a white tech bro.
I wrote the above post. I like the creative cases!
But maybe you are right and it isn't just engagement mining. I think my problem is more that I'm comparing the level of finish on the original cyberdecks to these ones, and they don't compare well.
But perhaps I should be thinking of these as prototype level ones.
(It's also very valid to point out the original ones were so well finished because they were engagement mining too)
If I listen to X band. Watch Y film. Am I doing it purely for myself or have I been prodded by society in some way?
Am I a 'real' fan of band X, or not, because I only got into them with there latest hit album?
This isn't a new thing. Niche thing becomes popular. Fans of niche thing try to gate keep.
My biggest critique would be that the author doesn't realise the 'algorithmic plantation' they are in. The only cyberdecks I've seen are made by white men. Not trans and black people.
Further I don't even think it's about cyberdecks per se. That's the in thing. Before that it was neo pixels or whatever. People like to make things, and people are influenced by others. The cyberdecks isn't the counter cultural element. It's the making of whatever that is. Cyberdecks are just the latest thing.
My opinion is somewhat that the last "real" cyberdeck was the Hackberry Pi, which is essentially the Blackberry I always wanted and that they never produced. Due to it being fully open, there's an insane amount of 3d printing community overlap, where people share their upgrades, designs, modifications and customizations.
Raspberry Pi as a platform has revolutionized access to computers in my opinion, though since the RAM crisis started not so much anymore due to the insane price differences. But the Hackberry is the computing device where I think it has lots of potential for being my actual "Linux on the go" that I wanted but never got ... for the last 15(?) years waiting for it.
[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5
Depends what you define as a cyberdeck. If you look low power/ non-linux there are many innovative decks: https://hackaday.com/2023/03/06/low-power-challenge-the-pota...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK0uAKkt0AE colorforth deck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn0MxHlima0 discrete deck built like the tandy 1000
If Cyberdeck builds get people building, then it's all good. Farming does encourage others to build so it's all heading in the right direction :)
I recently got a (good!) 3D printer, and that combined with Claude has got me building lots of custom hardware devices using ESP32s.
I don't really see the value in a full-computer experience (which seems to be what most cyberdecks try to do - badly) but I can see utility in "sidecar"-style hardware, which is more akin to a phone app but with a better experience because of custom hardware.
I'd be very interested in reading about the kinds of hardware projects you're doing with esp32s and your printer!
I have a (very much!) enhanced version of https://github.com/anthropics/claude-desktop-buddy running on a different ESP32 board with a case: https://github.com/nlothian/claude-desktop-buddy-FNK010B/tre...
I have a bunch of Home Assistant controls using a variety of custom controls and cases.
I have a custom version of Seeed's ESPClaw (https://github.com/Seeed-Projects/espclaw - there are a lot of other ESP Claws too) with a case.
I'm working on a Tamgotchi-style mini-game device using ESP-NOW to connect with nearby devices.
Lots of other random projects at various stages of development.
Any chance you have or could post pics of those custom HA controllers? Seeing custom interactables and how they integrate with ppl's environments are always suuuuper interesting
https://imgur.com/a/p7P1WBt
One-shotted LVGL UI (which I think it a bit ugly).
A Bluetooth gateway has a flat battery so 2 temperature sensors aren't getting relayed.
This is a Guition ESP32-S3-4848S040 board with this case https://makerworld.com/en/models/2859961-guition-4-esp32-s3-...
About $25 in total I think.
I love the fit and finish on the case. Neat to just one shot little control panels like that. Have you thought about making more? Context sensitive based on the room or activity in that area?
Yes the fit & finish is pretty nice.
Currently it's mostly a case of building them to solve specific problems, and I don't really have much else I need. This one controls my temperature and lighting for when I don't want to pick up my phone.
I have physical switches for most things too.
Something I've been doing is making an automated hydroponic tent. Temp, humidity, EC sensors and a few servos to control nutrients all feed into an esp32 + servo controller and broadcast data through a local webapp. Just need to add a camera for timelapses and remote viewing.
What keeps going through my mind regarding this topic is that we have Instagram for pictures, YouTube for videos, Reddit as a forum, Twitter/Bsky as a microblogging service, and so on. But what if we focused on locality again? What if each city/region had its own virtual meeting place for pictures, videos, forums, microblogging, and so forth? I don't mean a "super app" that simply divides things regionally, but rather that each regional center builds its own Hangout.
I realize that this sounds fantastical, and I don't know how something like that could be implemented in the current situation. It's more the idea that while Facebook and similar platforms allow us to see content from people all over the world, we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
> we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
Exactly, and the local layer is actually were we as normal people have the most power of participation, opportunity to find consensus and act together for the overall common (local) good. And the beautiful emergent side-effect is that this local good turns automatically into a global good if it's approached locally from the bottom up.
Side-note: The (global) commercial news industry is very contra-productive to actual useful action: by reporting 24/7 almost only negative out-of-reach quick changing 'news' that people can't possible resolve in any way by their own, has as effect the entrapment of cynicism that keeps people from doing local community action. This inertia is of course very welcome by the few conglomerates that run the world and rather would like seeing you in despair and inactive while patching over the real issues with cheap consumerism they also conveniently provide.
Study after study shows that the only real antidote to this despair is local-action: bounding together with others and doing positive tangible things on the local level.
I live in a village with 2.000 people and about 25 common Whatsapp channels. And it is hell. Sometimes, you really don't want to interact with your neighbors beyond the courtesy "hello". These people don't have anything in common with you, other than your coordinates on the map. That's no basis for a functional community in the online sense.
Exactly."Local only" sounds like a good idea to people who were born after the internet turned us all into a global village. People who remember bulletin board systems that were mostly limited to your own area code often have a different take.
To me, it feels like we already tried not being able to talk to people who were far away from us once already, and what it did was lead to cultures dominated by the most popular view. Uncommon and unpopular voices were marginalized to the edges (at best - sometimes they were met with violence and bullying) and often ignored completely. If you were on the fringe, you either didn't have anyone to talk to or had to befriend the one other person within 25 miles with a similar quirk.
Is it bad that the internet has amplified the voices of every fringe group to ridiculous volumes? Sure. On the other hand, people in the US people use the terms "black neighborhood" and "white neighborhood"? That's what staying local gets you. Local only was gross then, and it's gross now.
This might be more about whatsapp poor organisation tools, the general need for private ML-based smart indexing/notifications and efforts at structured community building.
Local social is one of the most attempted startup ideas of the 2010s. It is quite challenging because network effects are hard to reach at the local scale, and you need significant moderation to prevent bullying.
A big issue is the NextDoor effect. The most prolific posters are going to be people who saw a black person walking around and are startled by it and posting about it. Sane people see that and leave.
Yes, I see scaling as the biggest problem. Instead of developing one service for potentially 7 billion users, you're building 10 services for maybe 1 to 10 million users each. It would probably come down to patching together open-source solutions like Keycloak, Immich, FreeTube, Flarum, etc. I find atproto, on which Bluesky/Eurosky are based, particularly interesting.
I'm not so sure whether bullying is really a big problem. In such a regional environment, it makes little sense to appear "anonymous." You might not want your name and address publicly available, but if you comment on the popular parties and clubs, neighborhood happenings, etc., people who know you in real life will naturally recognize you. Ultimately, it comes down to how the local population operates.
Moderation is a hard problem, period.
> we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
Almost every larger city has a more or less active subreddit these days, on platforms like Twitter you can look what people post with a city name tag. And then there are Mastodon and Lemmy/Piefed with instances for geographic regions.
Local subreddits I follow have taken an absolute nosedive. They got astroturfed hard in recent election cycles and most people who are still left on their posting are people who legitimately need to go and touch grass. Everything is a 10 alarm crisis. No one actually understands anything beyond a baity headline interpretation of whatever issue is at hand. Have a benign opinion like "I actually think our city is pretty walkable as it is and I enjoy walking around" and you are met with downvotes and pitchforks for going against the narrative that everything is terrible and you should be shut inside. God forbid you indicate you have been biking around town without 1100 miles of bike lane being constructed first. You will get lectured and talked down for having wrong opinion.
Cyberdecks are nice for photos and build blog posts, but does anyone actually regularly use them?
Been working on a handheld cyberdeck with a good thumb keyboard. I'm masochistic enough to write entire projects on my smartphone with vim running inside termux, so I think anything that improves on this will certainly be used.
Measured my thumb's swiping arc and designed a split keyboard specifically for my hands. Managed to get every symbol in there with no layers. Now I just need to save up some money and order protypes so I can get a feel for the switches. Can't move forward until I've perfected the keyboard.
Are you documenting the process anywhere? Also dying for a good thumb keyboard someday.
For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.
I'm imagining a computer set up for DJing with big-ass speakers on the outside top lid, and a bunch of analog controls on either side of the keyboard, and a heavy battery.
That's not only possible, but was done to death in the early 2000s during the heyday of car audio components, "home theater" PCs, iPods, and finally good enough laptops.
If you built one of those you were automatically the DJ after school, at the skate park, etc. You better believe those SLA batteries were heavy.
The modern equivalant is the all-in-one karaoke machine :)
> "For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment."
Any real world examples? I don't think that's plausible from a RFI, power, heat, or just plain fragility perspective even with the cheapo hobbyist instruments suitable for kitbashing and only energizing a couple of instruments a time.
There's a bunch of SDR cyberdecks, there's a few that both lots more.
Take a look at this one:
https://hackaday.io/project/174301-raspberry-pi-sdr-cyberdec...
Or this one:
https://hackaday.io/project/192016-the-obsium-cyberdeck
Or take a look at what saveitforparts does on youtube
An RTL-SDR for the SDR and a Raspberry Pi Pico based "oscilloscope" just reinforces the extent to which these devices aren't practical.
Idk if it merits being called a cyberdeck, but i use my rickety suitcase tablet+keyboard+mouse (+ powerbank) setup which I VNC from to my house computers mainly. One of the reasons is local LLMs being often impractical to run directly in my laptop, especially as I also do other things. Before that I didn't use it as much. Sometimes I just put the laptop and the mouse in the suitcase, mainly because I find the trackpad virtually unusable for VNC, particularly for copy-paste.
They're interactive art projects!
The ideal "cyberdeck" form factor is just a regular laptop. So to the extent that a macbook pro counts as a cyberdeck, yes.
Technically, a real cyberdeck is a VR rig with no screen.
This fad is more about making custom cases for hardware.
I got a ClockworkPi uConsole and am not really using it much, and that’s because it’s become very hard for me to read on the high dpi small screen for too long.
More of a fun Maker project for sure
The two non computer device I use today are my digital audio player (DAP) and my ereader. If I have the time and money, that would be the kind of specialized tasks that I could design a cyberdeck towards. The laptop form factor is quite nice for computing although I would like more direct ports than USB which is complex for experimentation.
no, they're plastic crap for kickstarter photos. not designed for human hands.
They once existed (see Sony Vaio P 2nd gen; coolest thing in the universe) but modern OEMs no longer have such taste.
GPD makes several devices that come close to the old compact Vaios. I have the GPD Win Mini and it's a pretty capable machine - 32GB RAM, 2TB storage, RDNA 3.5 gfx, built-in gamepad, full set of ports.
The keyboard is surprisingly usable, although of course nowhere close to that of a laptop, but still usable for short periods. I got a fully fleshed out Arch gaming setup (manual install) and I use it on a regular basis like a Steam Deck and just a portable dev/test machine at work.
I always wanted one of the tiny form factor laptops but during that period I had a specific need for a real non-usb hardware serial port and instead bought a laptop that actually had one which was very strange (2009 maybe?)
I think these things are interesting, but I grew up on neuromancer...and so I have some cognitive dissonance when I see these described as cyberdecks and see screens.
I get that the term has moved on, and cyberdeck means whatever people say it means now. But to me, these are just novel retro diy laptops. I think given today's technology you could sort of a approximate a cyberdeck with some low end ar/vr glasses like something from xreal and ditch the screen.
that's why I still love the quest3, just for the potential. but xreal makes more sense, and then a more open platform. but I think post-covid we approach neuromancer more than ever.
Someone said to me yesterday "I'm thinking about building my own cyberdeck" and I boggled, because the only meaning I knew was the Neuromancer one.
At CCCamp 2023 was someone showing off how they converted a laptop with a broken screen into a cyberdeck by removing the screen and permanently connecting the bottom half to VR glasses.
There was also a musical Tesla coil. And some group called Anderstorp, who converted a massive obsolete router into a beer tap.
Now this would at least resemble a cyberdeck from the books.
Analog Electronics are the goat, there this whole branch of people who make electronic music using pure analog circuits, here is an example : https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOr4ShNCFBv/?igsh=MTR2MWx6aHh...
I'll just wait until I can jack in with a jailbroken Neuralink.
If you already have the electrodes installed in your brain you can use stimulation circuitry from the courtocal labs cl1 to get a bidirectional bci.
https://corticallabs.com/cl1
Unfortunately getting that as elective surgery is impossible in the developed world and the quality of Brazilian back alley brain surgery leaves a lot to be desired.
"Yeah I don't get it..." meanwhile me packing for holiday with my GrapheneOS Pixel with my 3D printed phone stand and my BT mechanical keyboard "Wait a minute!"
Also gave a workshop last weekends to kids and brought a "server" as a RPi Zero and a cheap (as in goodie level) tiny battery.
Damned, I'm part of the "movement".
At the end of the day, the very system you claim to oppose will ultimately profit from this "movement."
I am not trying to look down on a hobby. Building cyberdecks is cool, and it's a great learning experience, but it's not a movement.
Other than being a fun project, a cyberdeck serves no practical purpose and lacks any real daily driving application. It sparks no actual rebellion. it's just a product not the revolution. but i wish it was, i genuinely wish people would just show the finger to big corporations.
Forget the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace Seven, I'm still waiting for a Sandbenders.
> Technology was supposed to connect us[...]
Was it? According to whom? The quoted phrase is pretty much a meme at this point, but I don't think it's true. This would suggest people in the 80s and 90s were sitting around feeling lonely and isolated, wishing they could be "more connected".
Technology has always been about one thing: giving people more freedom. Whether it's the ability to make coffee at home, or travel vast distances at great speeds whenever you want to, it's all about people being free from the constraints of relying on society (and the environment) for things.
It's all fundamentally counter to a cohesive society. It was never going to make us "more connected", quite the contrary. Asimov saw where this was going half a century ago. In his books the Solarians took technology to the extreme, allowing them to live alone on enormous estates affording them all the freedom in the world. But they were alone, communicating only remotely through screens. They didn't even have sex any more. Sound familiar?
When I read this as a teen it totally put me off "freedom" as the singular goal so many people treat it as. I didn't want to end up like that. I don't want to be alone. Life is about sharing and technology is never going to help with that, it's only going to make it worse, if we let it.
> This is apparent in the rise of "journal tok", where people on TikTok are posting about returning to written journals, planners, and sketchbooks.
Is this intended to be ironic? People will do anything for views on TikTok, including making videos about not using TikTok. If anyone does anything and puts it on TikTok, or other social media, I assume they're doing it for the views, not because they actually enjoy it. If you want to find someone who enjoys cooking, find someone who will cook and eat with you, don't look on TikTok. If you want to find someone who doesn't like TikTok, well, guess where you won't find them.
The rest of the article is filled with TikTok videos which I'm not going to watch.
I became an engineer because I'm lazy.
Or just pick up any shithouse old laptop from a thrift store or wherever and put Linux Mint on it. Done.
i've seen many people get into cyberdecks. stuff like this gets people feet wet for stem professions like engineering and programming.
This! Its learning and a rite of passage, like with ‘guilds’ / the arts and crafts movements / craftsmanship described in the article (but not discussed as far as i can see). Sorry forgot the name for this thing… basically a master / apprentice project.
Very compelling read on how common people cooperatives were always the only counterweight to the ruling class - and how the elites constantly tried to polarise the common people to take power from them.
> The Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, and our current Techno-Fudalist time are all connected. We still have lords (land lords, the bourgeoisie), we still have kings who enclose the commons (billionaires who enclosed the commons of the internet), who enforce violence with the hand of private armies of knights (the police and military), who demand that we provide for them while they subjugate us. Medieval Guilds & The Arts and Crafts movement
> Medieval guilds were created during feudal times as a challenge to the labor exploitation of the working class of the time. In some areas, guilds were organized by specific crafts. Metalsmithing, woodworking, and textiles are some examples. Guilds had specific guidelines on quality, and they created widespread quality control over the goods produced by the artisans in the guild. If a woodworker produced bad-quality furniture, their guild could basically force them to remake it to their quality standards.
> Guilds were basically worker cooperatives (in some cases) or could be thought of as trade-specific labor unions
> Cyberdecks are changing for the better
> I say that cyberdecks are having another wave of resurgence because the interest in cyberdecks waxes and wanes, like everything in life, there is a cycle to the ideas coming into focus and out of focus, washing into the shore and washing back out to the sea of etheral thought.
> In my own view, cyberdecks have remained popular because of hacker culture. And all of the cultural norms wrapped up in hacker subcultures carries along with it. Specifically, the design of cyberdecks over the years has maintained a steady state of projects that maintain a military or scientific bend to them. They are afterall, influenced by science fiction about dystopian future societies that focus on war, dystopian corporate megacities, or interstellar travel.
AI or just terrible writing?
The whole piece feel like vibe farming by some youngling piecing together part of the hacker culture as seen by the media in the 90s with some reddit or vintage tumblr trends on top. I resonated with a lot of themes it tries to capture but it ends up looking more like a teen trying to commodify a subculture in a performative way rather than a real tentative alternative to the system, as we saw every generation or so.
I'm all in for lowtech, degrowth, permacomputing, Bookchin municipalism and Illich like "tools for conviviality" but here it seems.. candid and non genuine.
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