#altcomputing

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.

The social web is a corpse, dressed in neon. Instagram, X, Tumblr, TikTok — each a haunted ruin of its promise, each twisting the feed into something that serves the platform, never the user.

Instagram is a tire fire of people trying to be “creative,” but what you get is a stream of asses, hustle posts, and shallow aesthetics. It’s not art, it’s audition tape — all surface, no signal.

X is text fight club. A casino of outrage where words are chips, battles are monetized, and the fantasy of being a “layer protocol” masks the reality: it’s just a pit engineered to keep you swinging.

Tumblr? Haunted 2005. Fandom ghosts, cobweb rules, safe-space nostalgia. It works only because no one is watching — like broadcasting from an abandoned tower. Useful in its irrelevance.

TikTok is the only one that actually works — too well. Funny clips, sharp edits, niche content that feels made for you. But it also tracks mood like blood in the water. Pause a fraction too long on something heavy, and it knows. It feeds you content that mirrors your insecurity, reinforces your spiral, and then slides the ads under the door. It’s Facebook’s old playbook — sadness for antidepressants, weight for diets — but sharpened to a weapon. A dopamine dealer with psyop side-effects.

The lesson? These networks aren’t delivery systems for audience. They’re containment fields. You don’t build reach there, you feed the algorithm. The “followers” are shallow, the traffic doesn’t travel.

The only way out is personal broadcast. The cockpit model: your rig, your signal, your site. A page as minimal as a text manifest and an image folder still outlives the algorithm. A ticker that scrolls your own words, a kill switch for your own line, a deck you actually pilot. Platforms can be funnels, but the broadcast lives where you own it.

The networks are haunted. The feeds are dead. The cockpit is alive. Build your own signal. Broadcast from your own tower.