lance robotson - iyb/acc

@robotson.media

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Welfare³ advocate | Speculative Design @ UCSD (BA ’27) | exploring futures & saying “it’s ya boi” | https://robotson.media

rainbow color coded map of 2456 hydrological unit subbasins across America, titled "The United Subbasins of America"

Person standing beneath a large, sprawling tree in a sunny park, reaching up toward a thick branch while a dog sniffs the ground nearby. Apartment buildings and grass are visible in the background. Overlaid on the image are three book covers: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Bogna Konior (bright green, pink, and black design), Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (black cover with red text listing multiple contributors), and Vector Media by Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert (cloudy, atmospheric cover design). Text on the image reads: “Performative Spring break Reading list!”

Two diagrams juxtaposed: the Speculative Futuring ‘Cone of Possibilities’ (Dunne & Raby) showing nested, orderly layers of possible, preferred, probable, and plausible futures expanding from the present — paired with Anthropic’s misalignment scaling diagram, which uses a nearly identical cone shape but dissolves into tangled, divergent reasoning paths as model intelligence and task complexity increase. The visual rhyme suggests the tidy futures cone is an idealized version of what is actually a chaotic branching process.

Screenshot of the disintegrator podcast instagram account post about their interview with McKenzie Wark

Speculative Everything, by Dunne & Raby

Diagram with three overlapping circles. Top left circle (blue) = “Biotechnical Embrace (Good)” with text “Clinical pull & affective attachments.” Top right circle (green) = “Political Economy of Hope (Petryna)” with text “Global circuits of capital, regulation, inequality.” Bottom circle (red) = “Immortalist vs Deathist Debate” with text “Ethical horizon: Should we seek immortality?” Where the top circles overlap is the phrase “Shared terrain: Hope as obligation & resource.” Title at top: “Intersecting Frameworks of Medical Hope & Ethics.”

"My cohort of citizens," he wrote, had once been willing to accept diversity policies as the cost of prior bigotry in American society,
"even though the discrimination was now aimed at us," according to the screenshots.
"The insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020, totally shredded that complacency," Andreessen added, apparently referring to protests and discussion of diversity after the death of Floyd. "And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore," he wrote.

Live for all time.
We say no to death as fate. We want to live long—no end. We want to bring back all who did not want to die.

Go where you want.
Life should spread and grow. We do not like walls or claims. All should roam as they wish, through all space.

Be what you want.
Change is life. All things should be free to grow, to shift, to turn into new forms. To not change is to die.

If you want to.
It’s your pick. Do as you wish. Let all have these rights too.

John Oliver sits at a news desk on Last Week Tonight, gesturing mid-sentence. Beside him on screen is an image of Oscar the Grouch dressed in a red ceremonial robe and hat adorned with Illuminati-like symbols—eyes inside palms and a glowing triangle on his hat—emerging dramatically from his trash can against a cosmic background.

Me with my laptop harness at a campgrounds holding a microphone hooked up to my MacBook

Screenshot from the Artificiality podcast episode “The Platypus and the Planetary” featuring Benjamin Bratton. The highlighted text reads:
“Another way we may come back to look at this is that the training of LLMs and the transposition of LLMs into essentially the means of production available as a monthly prescript, subscription, or for free, for some form of models, will be the largest transfer of intellectual capital from the global north to the global south that could have happened during this time by this transference of general intelligence as a kind of construction.”

A promotional email from LinkedIn offering a one-month free trial of LinkedIn Premium. The message greets the recipient by name (“Hi there, Lance!”) and thanks them for being an active member. There’s a prominent blue button labeled “Retry 1 month free.” A disclaimer below notes that after the trial, charges will apply unless canceled.

A digitally altered image mimicking the iconic Polaroid scene from the film Memento. In place of the original photograph, the Polaroid displays a heavily edited, AI-generated portrait of U.S. Vice President JD Vance. His facial features are exaggerated to appear cartoonishly infantile: enlarged eyes, chubby cheeks, and a small mouth, giving him a grotesque, baby-like appearance. He wears a makeshift crown resembling a paper hat. Beneath the photo, the handwritten caption reads, “DON’T BELIEVE HIS LIES.” The image satirizes Vance’s political persona by combining cinematic reference with distorted imagery to question his authenticity.

A sleek, minimalist gray book cover titled “Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual” by Morgane Billuart. Geometric, wireframe vector glyphs orbit the names Geert Lovink, Joshua Citarella, Alex Quicho, and Sophie Publig—schematics of information flow or a clandestine protocol. The design evokes a user manual for intellectual self-commodification in the age of feedback loops and algorithmic subjectivity

Screenshot of a podcast episode titled “31. Incarnation (w/ Pete Wolfendale)” from the podcast Disintegrator. The screen shows a transcript excerpt discussing the philosophical notion of “rational inhumanism.” Highlighted text reads: “The purpose of rational inhumanism is to kind of find that thing within humanism, which is taking itself beyond it, this kind of revisionary vector of transformation.” The discussion references critical posthumanism and critiques of transhumanism:

So like rationality has reformatted the ape, right, into us and can potentially continue to keep doing that, stripping away things that we previously considered to be essential. It's a kind of practical corollary to the theoretical notion of revision, is that not just can we revise our theoretical
understanding of the way the world is, we can also revise our understanding of ourselves and what we should be. So the way in which Reza sort of describes this is the human is less of a substance than a vector.
The purpose of rational inhumanism is to kind of find that thing within humanism, which is taking itself beyond it, this kind of revisionary vector of transformation. This is basically the truth in the critique, the critical posthumanist critique of transhumanism. Critical posthumanists will basically say transhumanists are still kind of too humanist, and they're right.”

Screenshot of an Axios article highlighting AI polling results. The bolded stat says 77% of Americans want companies to slow AI development to get it right the first time. A bullet point shows only 23% prefer faster progress despite potential mistakes. A highlighted line notes that support for slower AI drops to 63% among millennials, but rises to 74% for Gen Z. The article argues most people reject the “AI race” mindset.

A black circular button featuring a distorted, wrinkled, and sagging wojak meme face, evoking exhaustion and decay. Below the face, the caption reads in lowercase: “healthcare pls.” A bleak, darkly humorous take on the healthcare crisis.

A sparsely furnished room with two red-upholstered chairs, a small round table, a fireplace, and a blue door. On the wall is a painted slogan in French: “Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires,” with English subtitles below reading: “We should replace vague ideas with clear images.”

Alt Text:

Diagram titled “Socio-cultural Dynamics between the Eras of Commodity Economy: Pastoralism, Capitalism, Vectorialism”, interpreting McKenzie Wark’s idea that “what comes after capitalism is even worse.” The x-axis shows socio-economic history progressing rightward; the y-axis represents increasing abstraction in ownership and control, from physical land (bottom) to capital, to data and vectors (top).

On the left side of the chart are class categories by historical mode of production:
• Farmer (bottom left, physical land, toil)
• Worker (above Farmer, industrial labor)
• Hacker (above Worker, in information era)
• Landlord (above Farmer, owns land)
• Capitalist (above Landlord, owns capital)
• Vectorialist (top, owns/control data and vectors)

The upper classes (Landlord, Capitalist, Vectorialist) are shaded in black and aligned vertically, representing continuity of power, wealth, and inherited control. Lower classes (Farmer, Worker, Hacker) are shaded in gray and aligned diagonally, reflecting discontinuity between historical stages and vulnerability to upward corruption.

Text notes emphasize:
• Top classes share tacit cultural knowledge and inheritance.
• Bottom classes lack continuity and can be co-opted into elite structures.

Credit: Boris Anthony, 2017. Attribution notes Wark’s definition of “Vectorialist” as those who control information and its means of distribution.

A graphic compares the energy usage of AI-generated tasks: 15 text prompts (29 Wh), 10 image prompts (12 Wh), and 3 video prompts (2,832 Wh). A bar graph visually emphasizes how video generation dominates, consuming 98% of the total 2.9 kWh. The accompanying text criticizes this framing, likening it to blaming a pack of gum for a $315 restaurant bill, and argues for clearer communication about which actions actually drive high energy use.

A screenshot of a passage titled “Making Kin with the Machines.” The text discusses the challenge for Indigenous epistemology in understanding cyberspace—described as an archipelago of websites, social media, virtual environments, and smart technologies—and how these exist alongside the physical territories Indigenous peoples claim. It raises the question of how Indigenous people can reconcile embodied experiences of land with disembodied virtual experiences and how to claim virtual spaces as their own.

A digital art parody combining Velázquez's "Las Meninas" with Minions. The original painting's dark, somber interior is preserved with its back wall, ceiling, and doorway where a figure stands in the background. The foreground is filled with numerous yellow Minion characters in blue overalls replacing the royal subjects and attendants from the original masterpiece. A blank canvas is visible on the left edge of the frame.

DISNEY PLUS
STREAM ON
Anora
Marketing email

Gigachad NPC

A photoshopped image of an AI-generated Grok meme featuring the face of He Jiankui, the controversial CRISPR scientist, in a lab coat. He is holding a glass jar containing a small, artificially created baby with the face of Donald Trump.

ransom note text reads; "I'D LIKE TO ADD YOU TO MY PROFESSIONAL NETWORK ON LINKEDIN"

In the style of ransom note letters cut out from different sources: “I HOPE THIS MESSAGE FINDS YOU WELL”

billy zane from twin peaks saying "what exactly does that have to do with the price of eggs?"

A stack of books and a deck of tarot cards on a wooden table. The top card is the judgement card from the HEXEN 2.0 deck by Suzanne Treister, which features an illustration of the word ‘ETHICS’ in a plant form textured font. Below it are three books: ‘Capital is Dead’ by McKenzie Wark, ‘CCRU Writings 1997-2003,’ and ‘All Media is Training Data’ by Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst. The selection suggests themes of media theory, philosophy, accelerationism, and speculative research.

Caption for this screenshot: “The vector episteme transforms how knowledge works. Instead of words having fixed meanings in dictionaries, they exist as points in a mathematical space. Their meaning comes from what they're close to, not what they represent.

This isn't just a technical detail - it's changing how we think. When we interact with AI, we engage with a system that understands through patterns and probabilities, not symbols or experiences. It's a fundamentally different way of making sense of the world.

As this way of organizing knowledge becomes dominant, we're moving toward a hybrid understanding where human experience blends with machine patterns. This shift is as significant as the move from oral to written culture, reshaping what it means to know something in the age of artificial intelligence.“

I'm actually both much more worried about Al and its effect on
society, particularly teenagers.
But also weirdly, these conversations forced me to
confront some of my assumptions about how
education works, to actually examine how writing is taught in American schools right now, and to ask, is there something here that needed to be fundamentally changed anyway?

Normal looking picture of Elon musk

Screenshot of an X (formerly Twitter) post that reads: “Personally I don’t think Elon Musk is a Nazi. However I do think he is cisgender. It’s ya boi.” Below the post, there is a warning message from X stating: “Visibility limited: this Post may violate X’s rules against Hateful Conduct. Learn more.”

Elon Musk in a water cannon suit battling wild fires in front of the Hollywood sign

Monkey sees action, neuron activation illustration with LASER EYES

A strategic interaction diagram mapping ideological and technological forces on a dark background. The visualization uses a coordinate system with 'Collaboration Level' on the x-axis and 'System Resilience' on the y-axis, creating four quadrants.

Major elements are represented as glowing circular nodes in different colors:
- A large red node representing 'AGI' in the high collaboration, high resilience quadrant
- A blue node for 'Tech Right Networks' in the low collaboration, high resilience area
- A green node for 'Climate Action' in the middle-high collaboration zone
- A yellow node for 'Economic Nationalism' in the low collaboration, low resilience area

Dashed lines connect these nodes, labeled with interaction types like 'Tech Transfer', 'Resource Tension', and 'Innovation Flow'. Curved paths indicate 'High Synergy' and 'Low Synergy' zones.

Each quadrant is labeled to show the combination of resilience and collaboration levels. A legend in the bottom right explains the color coding: red for AGI Systems, green for Environmental, blue for Tech Networks, and yellow for Economic forces.

The visualization emphasizes how these forces might interact and create different outcomes based on their level of collaboration and contribution to system resilience."