Ube 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 creator, whose real name is Annike Tan, unveiled her very first build in March with a video partially captioned “fuck it. c*nty cyberdeck.” In that , 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. 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. In the years following the book's release, a bro-y community of hobbyists has dabbled with their own wires and screens to create homebrew devices, frequently for hacking purposes or on-the-go coding. Historically, decks have resembled a heavy-duty laptop, featuring a screen and small keyboard, often sleek, utilitarian, and housed in a Pelican briefcase to survive imagined, apocalyptic scenarios. What sets Tan’s cyberdeck apart is its aesthetic. Inside her refurbished clamshell purse, hardware-wise, is a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a small keyboard and screen. All fairly standard stuff—the cyberdeck’s feminine shell and crafty details are what subverts expectations. 📸: Courtesy of Annike Tan and Brianna