2013-01-31
Explanation
This comic, titled "A Short History of the Death of Culture," satirizes the recurring moral panic that each new technology or advancement will destroy civilization. It presents a series of panels moving backward through history, with each era'''s figure lamenting that a particular innovation is "killing culture."
The sequence begins with a modern man complaining that the internet is killing culture because nobody can write anymore, then moves to someone blaming television for destroying conversation, then to a Victorian-era figure blaming the telegraph for ruining complete sentences, then to someone blaming the printing press for destroying the ability to think, and then to a classical figure blaming literacy itself for ruining people'''s memory (a reference to Socrates'''s famous critique of writing in Plato'''s Phaedrus). The final panel takes the joke to its absurd extreme with a caveman-like figure complaining that having a large cranium is killing culture because nobody is amused by airborne feces anymore.
The comic makes the point that complaints about new technology destroying culture are as old as culture itself, and each generation'''s fears about cultural decline are essentially the same anxieties recycled with different targets. The votey panel adds a biological punchline by showing single-celled organisms, with one asking about sexual reproduction and another defending asexual reproduction as "tradition" -- pushing the joke all the way back to the most fundamental evolutionary changes and suggesting that resistance to progress is literally as old as life itself.