The Hottest Gen-Z Tech Trend? Anti-AI: Catherine Thorbecke

My favorite tech trend so far this year has nothing to do with artificial intelligence.

It’s the cool girls making their own “cyberdecks,” — strange, DIY and highly customizable personal computers that explicitly reject AI. They look like props from a cyberpunk movie, usually built on a Raspberry Pi base and spare parts. As one tinkerer, whose “mermaid cyberdeck” videos have drawn tens of millions of views, puts it: “What we should do with cyberdecks is gatekeep them from AI and megacorp.”

The cyberdeck boom follows the iPod as another Gen Z hardware obsession. Many of the models now being hunted online ...