Tourist Decks vs. Real CockpitsCyberpunk Cockpit Manifesto
There’s a sickness in the feeds: plastic tourist cyberdecks. Raspberry Pi bricks with tiny keyboards, bolted into 3D-printed cases, paraded on Instagram like trophies from a war they never fought. They’re not tools. They’re cosplay.
Let’s be clear: a real cockpit doesn’t start with aesthetics. It starts with pain. Problem → solution → function.
- No media keys? You build a pause bar.
- Net keeps cutting? You wire in a pulse and watch your LEDs blink the truth.
- Need signals streaming in real time? You spin up a ticker.
Every fragment is earned. Every organ of the cockpit exists because without it, the pilot bleeds time.
Now look at the tourist decks.
- Four-inch LCDs that scorch your eyes.
- Chiclet keyboards designed for toddlers, not operators.
- Tethered to a smartphone that could do every task better, faster, cleaner.
- It’s all form before function. Fake nostalgia. A cargo cult of movie props.
And the irony? Those movies — Hackers, The Net, every 90s cyber-thriller — got tech wrong in the first place. Neon GUIs, floppy disks with nuclear payloads, hackers typing like pianists on meth. Pure fantasy. The tourist deck isn’t just pretending to be a tool — it’s pretending to be a prop that pretended to be a tool. A Xerox of a Xerox. Dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, the cockpit grows like coral. Black boxes stitched together over years. Hardware knobs, kill switches, LED ghosts, fragments of code that live on because they work. It looks rough because it is rough. It looks alive because it is alive.
The tourist deck is a selfie. The cockpit is a survival rig. One is a weekend project for clout. The other is a control panel for your life.
Stop building
props. Start building
cockpits.
— Rev1
RACHEL TIPPED 
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