A San Francisco Airbnb host is suing The Bot Company, the $2 billion robotics startup founded by ex-Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, for allegedly using his home as a secret robot testing lab. Sean Donovan claims workers booked his Portola neighbourhood property under false pretences in April, posing as remote workers from Thailand. He is seeking $12,383 in damages.

What Donovan found was not a group of digital nomads. Using his outdoor Ring camera, he counted more than 30 people entering and leaving the house over 11 nights. He overheard some of them discussing their “shifts,” he told SFGate.

When Donovan stopped by to take out the trash, he found bundles of wires leading inside. He followed them and discovered a six-foot robot he described as looking like a “borg” from Star Trek, or a giant “Roomba with treads.” The Bot Company builds household chore robots but has shared almost nothing about its prototypes publicly.

The damage was extensive. A 70-year-old family dining table was scratched and water-marked. A Franciscan pottery set went missing. A bathroom tile was chipped, a coffee table banged up, and a broken mug had its handle glued back on. An entire shoe rack disappeared. “They came in and put everything back in a new place,” Donovan told SFGate. “Silverware in a new drawer or a different room.”

Vogt co-founded The Bot Company in 2024 with Paril Jain, the former head of Tesla’s AI division. The startup has raised more than $300 million, including a $150 million round led by Greenoaks. It is valued at approximately $2 billion, despite having revealed almost nothing about what it is building.

Vogt’s previous venture did not end well. He was CEO of Cruise, GM’s robotaxi division, which was shut down in 2024 after a series of safety incidents. GM absorbed the technical team and redirected autonomous driving work toward personal vehicles.

There is a legitimate reason to test household robots in real homes rather than sanitised labs. Domestic environments are cluttered, unpredictable, and full of objects that break. But doing it without the property owner’s consent, under a false identity, crosses a line. The lawsuit alleges unauthorised commercial R&D activity, including robotic prototype testing and filming for commercial purposes.

Other robotics companies testing in real-world environments have faced similar scrutiny. Robotaxi operators have been criticised for using public roads as de facto test tracks. The Bot Company appears to have applied the same logic to someone’s living room, and the result was a trashed house and a rare, accidental glimpse at a prototype the company would rather have kept secret.

When I reach out to the self-proclaimed “open source baddie” CC for an interview, I’m pretty sure she’s emailing me back from a pink mermaid purse.

“I’m just having so much fun,” she tells me about her seashell cyberdeck. “It’s a Tamagotchi. It’s also an e-reader. It’s networked to my vault and my servers, so it has access to all of my server data, which has all my PDFs, and books, and notes, and everything… It’s also connected to my local AI setup at home.”

CC has no background in software engineering or computer science, but she’s gotten good enough at building unconventional cyberdecks – small DIY computers – that she documents the process on her blog Bimbo Tech so that other women can follow her lead, even if they don’t yet know what RAM is.

The idea of the cyberdeck originated in William Gibson’s 1984 sci-fi novel “Neuromancer,” and when credit card-sized computers like the Raspberry Pi came on the market in the 2010s, hardware enthusiasts began building and sharing their own cyberdecks in niche online communities. But over the last few months, these communities have exploded in popularity thanks to women on social media who are teaching each other to build artistic, hyper-feminine computers by documenting their building processes.

“I have a running joke that there’s this underlying misogyny in tech – because whenever they release a pro model, or an elite model… I’m always like, let me guess, it’s black or silver,” CC said. “It’s never going to come in pink.” 

The process of customizing and designing a cyberdeck has become an art form in itself. On Instagram and TikTok, you can find a cyberdeck made of wood and moss that runs Game Boy Color games; a desert-inspired MP3 player built inside of a 3D-printed fossil; a Barbie dollhouse that opens up to reveal a functional mini-computer; or a duck figurine that can be used to record voice notes.

“I don’t want Meta AI glasses. I want to pirate books in a tiny embellished shell,” said the creator Sarahbelle Kim on TikTok. “No one can surveil you there. You can get some basic parts at the thrift or eBay and just customize it.”

There’s obviously an aesthetic motivation to the rise of girly cyberdecks — why not use a Hello Kitty purse to check your email? It’s fun for the sake of fun. But the women building these over-the-top, bedazzled cyberdecks aren’t in it for the glitter alone. This trend is reaching its peak at a time when people feel powerless against the omnipresent homogeneity of big tech.

“I think that’s such a refreshing thing for people who were sold these devices that are like Apple’s… If you try to jailbreak it, if you try to do anything to this phone that you paid $1,000 for, that you own, it’s out of warranty,” CC said. “So I just love seeing people taking the power back into their hands, taking the control back into their hands, which obviously always means creativity when people are given the means to go outside of the black box.”

Maro Vandanyan doesn’t work with hardware as a blockchain developer, but she’s always enjoyed collecting and tinkering with old computer parts.

“A few months ago, I just started as a hobby making art and jewelry pieces and purses with recycled or upcycled old computers I had,” she said. “When I saw everyone doing cyberdecks, I was like, wait, why am I just doing recycled and upcycled ones when I can actually preserve the pieces on something that’s wearable, that’s movable?” 

Vandanyan has taken a different approach to building cyberdecks, opting instead to emphasize the historic relationship between fiber art and technology. Vandanyan refers to her work as “crocheting with computers” or “macrame motherboards,” deliberately nodding to the role of weaving — a practice often viewed as domestic, women’s labor — in the history of early computing.

Before silicon processors, some early computers ran on magnetic-core memory, made up of copper wiring that was precisely threaded to encode the 1s and 0s of binary code. In order for NASA to build the Apollo Guidance Computer, for example, expert women textile workers were tasked with meticulously weaving wires in painstakingly complex patterns, which powered the spacecraft that landed the first man on the moon.

“The original processor was handwoven by seamstresses, not by engineers or anybody else,” she said. “I feel like the hand weaving, and even the fashion-meets-technology… It’s so full circle.”

Vandanyan started weaving pink Raspberry Pis to make purses and corsets, then posted photos of her works-in-progress on X.

“Of course, when the macrame went viral, all of the men are like, ‘This is such a waste of the Raspberry Pi,’ … or, ‘what about the rain?’” she said. “And then I have to be like, ‘Actually, it’s preserved in an acrylic shell.’ And then they’re like, ‘This is so performative, and the GPIO is gonna lose energy!’ And I’m like, ‘Actually, I’m using a conductive thread, so it actually will move and be fully functioning.’”

@gazi.ai

grass cyberdeck (allat to play pokemon yellow ). thoughts ↓ cyberdecks were never about making the “best” computer. they came out of Neuromancer (yes, i wrote my senior essay on it) as messy, personal machines. now it’s a whole maker subculture, but the core’s the same: control + identity + a quiet resistance to how polished tech has become. this one’s a grass cyberdeck, wood + moss + exposed parts. something that feels a little alive, a little off. built on a Raspberry Pi, nothing fancy. honestly a simple build, just wanted to show how easy it is to make something like this in your bedroom (i post my pc a lot, but this is just as cool). it’s not trying to compete with a GeForce RTX 4090 or be practical. it’s more about rejecting the “black box” (our everyday sealed, untouchable devices) and leaning into radical ownership, something you can open, understand, and actually call yours. more optimization soon #cyberdeck #pokemonyellow #reelsinstagram #hardware

♬ original sound – Gazi Jarin

CC has also encountered condescending men on the internet who balk at the idea that someone would use a Raspberry Pi on something as frivolous as a seashell purse computer during a RAM shortage.

“This guy on Reddit was like, ‘You built your first computer a month ago, calm the f— down.’ Mind you, I’ve been building PCs for years,” CC said. “So, long story short, he ends up apologizing and buying me the circuit board for my next cyberdeck.”

From CC’s mermaid purse computer to Vandanyan’s Raspberry Pi corset, these cyberdecks are a direct rejection of Silicon Valley culture, and not just in their egregious embrace of the color pink. They’re impractical and inefficient on purpose, which seems sacrilegious in a culture so obsessed with optimization that unregulated Chinese peptide injections are trendy. It’s a radical act to opt for hacky, DIY tech experiences in order to forge a closer relationship with the devices that feel so abstract despite their ubiquity.

“Ten years ago, I would walk into a conference, there would be three girls, and people would literally just be like, ‘Were you hired for the marketing team?’” Vandanyan said. “I can’t even tell you how amazing it is seeing so many girls all over my social media and Instagram being into hardware, being into software, and then educating [each other], and that’s definitely the energy that we’re missing on every level in society.”