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What is it with feminists and discovering perfectly normal things other people have been doing for donkey’s years, and pretending that they’re somehow ‘revolutionaries’?
In the ’90s, it was cat’s-bum-mouthed harridans like Andrea Dworkin, rehashing Victorian morality as ‘empowerment’. More recently, so-called ‘Cottage Core’ acts as if the sort of survival strategies my Depression-era parents grew up with (and passed on to us) are the last word in feminist revolution. (Of course, if you’re conservative, Kate Hannah will screech that your ‘Cottage Core’ enthusiasms are telltale signs of White Supremacism, as if home cooking and dressing your kids nicely is just a goose-step away from manning the gas chambers.)
Now, Millennial women are acting as if building home computers is a feminist revolution.
Cyberdecks – custom-made, portable computers – are garnering a loyal following from hobbyists online, particularly young women, looking to wrest back control from major tech companies and experiment beyond the algorithm.
Laura Alice Bracken, a Geelong-based artist, started building her own cyberdeck as an extension of her creative practice.
Well… congratulations: you’ve ‘discovered’ something nerds have been doing for decades. They just don’t feel the need to parade themselves as the last word in ‘empowerment’.
If Bracken had condescended, any time in the last few decades, to visit the long-running computer swap meet in Geelong, she’d not just have discovered a group of people who smell even worse than the average feminist. She’d also have discovered a knowledgable bunch who’d gladly have helped out – oops, mansplained – with building a computer from scratch.
Instead, we are breathlessly lectured that this formerly nerd-hobby is the “spirit of cyberdecks” where imagination is the limit. And naturally, “The renaissance of women, femmes and queer people getting into it are so creative, stylish and have this fashionista side.”
Not even that is in the least bit new. My current PC – and, apart from the very first one I bought in 1993, I’ve never owned a pre-built computer – is a hand-me-down from my eldest, a slick-looking home-assemblage of glass and coloured lights that looks like something straight out of a cyberpunk adventure. Indeed, 30 years ago, William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Idoru introduced the ‘Sandbenders’, who made computers out of melted aluminium from recycled cans, cast in sand moulds and fitted with bits of coral and nuts for switches. Another computer in Idoru is a clear plastic handbag filled with non-conductive gel, with the colourful components floating freely.
Like Bracken, “Summer” Sunkyoung Roh has been swept up in the cyberdeck craze, and is building a Tamagotchi (a digital pet toy hailing from Japan) inside an old “brick” phone.
How incredibly subversive. Guess what, girls? The nerds were decades ahead of you and twice as slovenly.
In Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold a kind of cyberdeck at UC Berkeley before founding Apple.
So… congratulations: you’ve ‘discovered’ something nerds have been doing for decades. They just don’t feel the need to parade themselves as the last word in ‘empowerment’.
Long before, Gibson, Jobs or Wozniak, though, there was a TV show which ran in Australia from 1970 to 1982. The Inventors was kind of technological Dragon’s Den, where some skinny bald guy in specs would try and flog his exciting new mousetrap. Female panellist Diana Fisher could be guaranteed to ask two questions: Is it safe for little fingers? and Does it come in pretty colours?
That’s all these feminist wondergals are doing: co-opting what nerds have been doing for decades, and sticking flowers all over it to make it ‘pretty’.
This is classic modern feminism: take something perfectly normal that enthusiasts (mostly men) have been quietly doing forever, slap a gender studies gloss on it, declare it a bold act of female defiance, and demand applause.
Keep tinkering, ladies. Just don’t pretend you’re striking a blow for womankind. The nerds in the garage have been doing it better, cheaper and without the sanctimonious TED Talk.
They just didn’t need a safe space and pronoun pins to get on with it.
