2014-10-26
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents a fictional alternate history where information replaces money as the currency of modern life. The formula is V = r * e * p (value equals rarity times exclusiveness times people affected). At first, this system seems easier than money -- people trade embarrassing personal secrets for goods and services. A person buys a Crunch Wrap by sharing a painful high school memory. The government releases embarrassing Pentagon secrets to purchase fighter jets. But inflation sets in: as more embarrassing information floods the market, its value drops. Citizens are forced to create new embarrassing information just to survive. Eventually, a robot is invented that can both generate and reveal embarrassing information at high speed. Soon information becomes so cheap that society enters "post-information" -- a politician promises "a chicken in every pot and a gigantic revelation in every ear." But the final problem: everyone was so busy trading information that nobody remembered how to grow food. Everyone dies. "On the plus side, we died with a great secret" reads a gravestone.
The Humor
The comic is an extended satirical thought experiment about information economics, taken to an absurd extreme. It parodies how modern society increasingly treats information (especially scandalous or private information) as a commodity. The humor escalates through increasingly ridiculous scenarios -- people cultivating clown fetishes just to have something embarrassing to trade, a politician's campaign promise including "a gigantic revelation in every ear." The punchline is a classic SMBC dark ending: the society collapses because everyone forgot to do actual productive work (growing food), dying with the cold comfort that at least they had a great secret. It is a commentary on how an information-obsessed economy might neglect real-world material needs.
References
The formula V = r * e * p parodies economic value formulas. The politician's promise of "a chicken in every pot" references Herbert Hoover's 1928 presidential campaign slogan. The concept of "post-information" parodies terms like "post-scarcity" from economics and science fiction.