Turning your purse into a cyberdeck is the most fun way to resist big tech
Key takeaways
- When I reach out to the self-proclaimed “open source baddie” CC for an interview, I’m pretty sure she’s emailing me back from a pink mermaid purse.
- “I’m just having so much fun,” she tells me about her seashell cyberdeck. “It’s a Tamagotchi.
- But over the last few months, these communities have exploded in popularity thanks to women on social media who are teaching each other to build artistic, hyper-feminine computers by documenting their building processes.
When I reach out to the self-proclaimed “open source baddie” CC for an interview, I’m pretty sure she’s emailing me back from a pink mermaid purse.
“I’m just having so much fun,” she tells me about her seashell cyberdeck. “It’s a Tamagotchi. It’s also an e-reader. It’s networked to my vault and my servers, so it has access to all of my server data, which has all my PDFs, and books, and notes, and everything… It’s also connected to my local AI setup at home.”
CC has no background in software engineering or computer science, but she’s gotten good enough at building unconventional cyberdecks – small DIY computers – that she documents the process on her blog Bimbo Tech so that other women can follow her lead, even if they don t yet know what RAM is.