God, I can't stand living in an artless world.
Jimmy Hendrix, If 6 was 9.
Has another relevant spoken word bit about waving his freak flag :)
A good portion of these stickers are to do with things that are political or quasi political. What tends to happen is that a lot if times people have been burned in someway for supporting an idea or a cause. This is often because people have been fooled by charlatan, or it was later revealed that things were more complicated or different than they were led to believe.
Cringe and why people hate it is best explained by watching the very first episode of the UK office.
Most people want to go to work, turn up and do their time and go home. People that are often top enthusiastic are difficult to deal with day to day. People that adorn their personal possessions with slogans are seen as a warning sign.
In the end, they're like the tattoos that someone else commented on. (I have those as well.) If you appreciate them, great! If you don't like them, that's fine too. Fundamentally, they're not for you.
Remember when who you voted for was sacred knowledge?
I think you might be romanticizing this, a bit. When you convince the public that not talking about something is the best course of action, they become a lot easier to control. We learned this during WWII with the propaganda machine that was fully employed on all fronts, and arguably before that with the work of Edward Bernays and people like him. If public discourse and debate could be quashed, then it was much, much easier to simply tell everyone what their opinions of a thing should be.
I think the big difference now is that people have a megaphone in the form of social media and they forget just how wide the statements they shout through it can spread.
What is a problem is doing it on an environment where participation is mandatory or required for basic survival.
I don't like many of the ones mentioned on this website but here are some minimalist examples [1] [2] [3] [4] and an exception I do like a bit because of the custom shape [5]. [1] is more like a skin.
[1] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/20250221_00333...
[2] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/laptop_cover.j...
[3] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_1259.jpg
[4] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_5753.JPG
[5] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/54917193947_1f...
I 'unno, it's fun I guess?
I see a sticker I like somewhere, brain goes 'heh, neat' and so I put it on my laptop with the other stickers. There's not much more to it.
Do you really think something, which is so extremely common among software developers, has the potential to showing your uniqueness.
The hill I will die on is that I despise outward signaling, especially outward signaling of something like "uniqueness".
I don't think my opinion is particularly unique and certainly I do it to appear unique.
>This sounds like a really tough way to live
It is much easier, because I do not have to be worried whether people see me as unique.
>I genuinely wish you the best of luck with your vendetta against checks notes people expressing themselves with stickers on their laptops.
Thank you.
I do it because it can be creative and fun. It adds color to an otherwise gray and boring surface and provides a practical way of identifying my laptop from everyone else’s.
When I was in school, we used to cover out textbooks with brown paper bags and then drawn on them. How is this any different?
You seem to have you entire identity tied to the notion of what you think a software developer is and that everyone should conform to that idea. I’d rather have people be creative, embrace fun, and add color and self expression to the world. We could all use more color in our lives.
And I feel like this greyification is only true in theory from the perspective of the manufacturers. I still run into plenty of people that are not afraid to decorate their space, laptop, or whatever else.
Greyification actually makes sense precisely because everyone has a different way of expression. That's why canvases are still white; you just have to find a different primer.
The greyification of our lives, the loss of whimsy and kitsch and being too afraid to be a little cringe, I get the sense that a lot of people associate "growing up" as the loss of any and all expression: we wake up in our grey beds in our millennial grey house, drive to work in our grey car to work in our grey cubical, etc, etc. If you want a gauche laptop covered in stickers, do it, embrace the gauche. Everyone sneering at you is more miserable than you.