Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

This long-form comic tells a story about the evolution of military technology and empathy. It begins with the premise that it is easier to kill at a distance than up close, so drones were created. Then, because it is easier to kill when you cannot see a face, software was created that obscures enemy faces. The "kill rate per mission" goes up 30 percent. But then hackers break in and reverse the software, making it display the enemies' faces and their families, which makes soldiers more empathetic toward their targets. The military fights back by securing their software while projecting empathy at the enemy. This escalation continues until the major focus of war becomes making enemies more empathetic than your own side. Eventually both sides argue that the enemy is "wholly made" of human beings containing "a spark of the divine" -- and when that distracts them, "shoot for the spine." But it turns out they could never stop the cyberattacks, and the enemies always seemed to find a backdoor. The program is finally dismantled. A general says they should have stuck with good old-fashioned long-distance missile strikes. In a final twist, a scientist asks "What if we created a vaccine for compassion?" and the narrator says "I just wish I'd put in that backdoor sooner" -- revealing that the narrator was the one who had been sabotaging the military's systems all along, trying to force compassion into warfare.

The Humor

The comic is a satirical take on the arms race, but instead of escalating weapons, the arms race is over empathy. The absurd premise that militaries would fight to make the enemy MORE empathetic (so they will not fight back) creates a darkly comic inversion of actual warfare. The escalation becomes increasingly ridiculous as both sides essentially argue for the divinity of human life -- while still trying to kill each other. The final twist reveals that the narrator was a saboteur who had been deliberately inserting "backdoors" to force soldiers to confront the humanity of their enemies. The comic's deeper satire is that modern warfare already involves elaborate psychological mechanisms to distance soldiers from the reality of killing, and the comic simply makes those mechanisms explicit and then imagines what would happen if someone tried to reverse them. The closing suggestion of a "vaccine for compassion" is a chilling punchline -- the military's ultimate solution is not to stop killing, but to eliminate the capacity to care.

References

• Drone warfare -- The comic references the real-world development of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) that allow operators to kill from great distances, which has raised ethical concerns about the psychological distance between operators and their targets.
• The Fermi Paradox is obliquely referenced in the structure of the comic, which Weinersmith would explore more directly in the next day's comic (2014-03-05).