Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The comic is captioned "Before the Internet" and shows a man lamenting that as technology improves, powerful people have more ability to use private information against citizens. He then has a eureka moment: "What if each individual creates so much worthless worthless data that the system can't be effectively used against us?" A woman responds: "Impossible. No one would ever participate in such a system."

The joke is a retroactive "prediction" of social media and the modern internet, framed as something that would have seemed absurd before it existed. The man essentially describes the internet -- a system where people voluntarily generate enormous amounts of trivial personal data (tweets, status updates, selfies, food photos). The woman's dismissal that "no one would ever participate in such a system" is the punchline, since of course billions of people eagerly do exactly that. The comic also contains a layer of irony: while the man frames the flood of worthless data as a privacy defense (making surveillance impractical through sheer volume), in reality the opposite has occurred -- big data analytics and social media have made mass surveillance easier, not harder. The data people generate turned out to be far more useful to those in power than anyone imagined.