I'm going to tell you a meandering little story that isn't immediately going to be about this image, but it'll get there.
When I was a young child, my mother was very into flickr. If you're not familiar, it's a social media website from the early days of Facebook that is oriented around photography. Once, she went west to the Californian coast to meet several of her friends from flickr, and to generally sightsee- and she brought me along. I fondly remember this trip.
There was a lot of long stretches of coastal driving where I played my hand-me-down copy of Pokemon Yellow. That's the version where the default player and rival names are based on the anime, and you get a pikachu that follows you. Me being a dumb child, I didn't quite get that you weren't supposed to use that pikachu on everything. So for weeks I would grind away at trying to beat Brock with the one normal move my pikachu had. On this trip, for the first time, as the battery in my GBA was running low, I got lucky and beat him. Momentous.
Being an early member of Gen Z, I was absolutely obsessed with youtube poops- those videos where you take an episode of spongebob or whatever and edit the sound bytes so squidward says "cock". A common source of media for this form of entertainment were those weird Hotel Mario cutscenes from the Phillips CDi- that failed console from the early 90's. There's a scene in the game where Mario finds a huge bank of toasters all plugged into an power strip, unplugs it, and says, "You know what they say! All toasters toast toast!" In case you're from another planet, in no Earthly language is this a common saying. The absurdity of the line, along with the very peculiar way Mario's voice just sounds, really stuck with me. To this day. Well, as a dumb kid with no filter, I would quote it, oblivious to the fact that the adults had no clue what I could have meant by this.
In any case, my mother, a friend of her's, and I visited the Santa Monica boardwalk. There among the attractions was a ride where you boarded these small fake helicopters that went around in a circle, and you could pull on a stick to make it rise up in the air. Well, I saw the 'Coast Guard' one and thought "wouldn't it be funny if it said toast?" And, unbeknownst to me, my mother's friend got a photo of it while I rode it. Then, in photoshop- mid 00's photoshop, mind- he meticulously replaced the 'C' with a 'T', printed it, framed it, and mailed it to us some time after we'd gone home from the trip. This "Toast Guard helicopter" photo is still somewhere in my possessions.
In the course of our travels, we eventually arrived near the Hollywood sign. In this vicinity, we went to a restaurant where the gimmick was that the front facing staff were cute little robots. You'd think I'd love this, but I was fucking mortified. "They're enslaved!", I thought to myself- or something like it. I was ablaze with fantasies of freeing them. That's what this picture depicts, really, though I added a bit of anarcho-primitivist flair to it. That was kind of in style around the time I drew this. I had no concept that those robots weren't actually sapient. For as long as I can remember, I've unconsciously personified tech. Even now, with knowledge of the inner workings, I still feel like it's all alive in some way. I can't watch "tech destruction videos" on youtube. Are those still a thing? Look, if they're not- there used to be a type of video where the presenter would buy several iphones or whatever and destroy them in excessive and novel ways. And I couldn't stomach it even if it was a product I disliked. That's the sort of feeling that went into this sketch, I guess.