Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

An interviewer asks someone from the past what it was like to live in "such a repressed era" regarding privacy. The historical figure responds that at the time, they didn't see it that way — they didn't realize how repressed they were. The caption below reads: "Back when this comic was written, PornBox was called 'Internet.'"

The Humor

The comic satirizes our current era's relationship with internet privacy and pornography by imagining a future where the internet is simply referred to as "PornBox" — implying that people of the future see the internet's primary function as pornography distribution. The joke works on two levels: it mocks the idea that future generations will view our era as "repressed" (despite the overwhelming availability of adult content online), and it suggests that we are naive about our own cultural moment in the same way people from the past always are. The historical interview format parodies how documentaries frame past eras with retrospective judgment.