Amongst other things currently barely understood by most of us due to some sort of mix-up of living in the present, I find it strikingly odd that the cyberdeck is an object of fiction while we seemingly fail to recognize the thing already sitting on our desks and living in our dedicated bags.
A laptop is a portable computational device with its own display, keyboard, storage, power supply, network interfaces, and means of connecting to other machines and peripherals. It travels with you, its operator.
In a functional sense, I think, the cyberdeck has arrived decades ago, but we simply called it a laptop.
Perhaps the issue is not its hardware, but maybe our relationship with it?
Take a stock laptop of any brand: it is presented as a finished product. Literally finished. Closed up. Someone else chose the mem, the drives, the OS, several operational assumptions, the partitioning of its capabilities. It is intended for use, rather than understanding.
But the very moment I open the case and replace something, that relationship changes.
My own laptop now has a second drive chosen for a particular purpose. I know which parts are fast, which parts are old, where the bottlenecks are, and which upgrades would merely produce better benchmark numbers rather than a better machine.
This is why I call it a cyberdeck: a personal computer whose architecture has become known to me, has become intentional as well as used. It is configured in a certain way, because that is how I use it.
Mine is a command, research, and creative terminal. It connects me to machines elsewhere, but it doesn’t need to impersonate them. Servers belong on servers. The deck belongs with me, its operator.
Perhaps the cyberdeck was never a particular form factor.
Perhaps it begins when a computer stops being an appliance and becomes a tool you understand.
I don’t care for cyberpunk aesthetics, although my laptop looks a lot like straight out of some Arasaka ad: I think cyberdecks are about tool consciousness. And I have been working with this laptop for a few years now. I am conscious of it as a tool. A very interesting, and a very powerful tool.
Quelle: Original auf Code & Canvas