Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

This long-form comic traces the evolution of social media and its effects on society through several stages:

1. Reporting bias: People are more likely to report success than failure on social media, creating the false impression that others' lives are uniformly wonderful.
2. Sucktribution: A "suck payment" is introduced -- every time someone posts something good, they must also share something bad (their life "sucks" in some way). This is meant to balance the distortion.
3. Unintended consequences: The online ecosystem changes so that everyone's feed is filled with failure and misery, making people who actually struggle feel even worse.
4. Economic collapse: People who can demonstrate that their lives "suck most" gain social capital. Service sector employment drops massively as people compete to be the most miserable. The economy collapses.
5. Status inversion: Wealth, leisure, and equality become markers of shame. A wealthy woman laments having to update her social status as "just as miserable as everyone else" while spending it all on expensive misery-signaling.
6. Robot solution: Robots are created to live in constant misery so humans don't have to, effectively outsourcing suffering. A protest sign reads "Human Oppressors."
7. The Gotcha: A robot is asked about living under perpetual surveillance, and it responds that it doesn't mind as long as it's habitual -- making its daily life "feel like something."

The comic ends with the dark punchline that the robots, created to suffer on humanity's behalf, find meaning in their surveillance-laden existence, paralleling how humans found meaning in performed suffering on social media.

The Humor

The comedy works as an escalating absurdist satire. It starts from a real, widely recognized phenomenon -- the positivity bias on social media making everyone feel inadequate -- and then follows a proposed "fix" to its logical, increasingly ridiculous conclusions. Each stage of the solution creates a new problem worse than the last, satirizing how techno-utopian solutions to social problems often backfire spectacularly.

The comic also satirizes virtue signaling and competitive victimhood culture, where demonstrating suffering becomes a form of social currency. The final twist with the robots adds a philosophical layer: even artificial beings created solely to suffer find a way to normalize their condition, just as humans adapted to each new distortion of social media. The joke is ultimately about how any system humans create to manage perception and status will be gamed, corrupted, and ultimately produce outcomes no one intended.

References

The comic references the well-documented psychological effects of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where curated self-presentation leads to unfavorable social comparisons and reduced well-being. The "suck payment" concept parodies proposed regulatory interventions in social media. The robot subplot touches on philosophical questions about consciousness and suffering that echo discussions in AI ethics.