Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This is a longer-form SMBC comic exploring the concept of declining attention spans and its implications for society.

The comic begins with someone observing that "our attention spans are larger than ever" -- a contrarian opening that goes against the popular narrative. Another character challenges this, and the comic presents a graph showing attention span declining over time, seemingly confirming the conventional wisdom.

However, the comic then complicates this narrative. It explores the idea that while people's moment-to-moment attention may have shortened, their overall engagement with media and information has actually increased in complex ways. People today consume enormous quantities of content -- binge-watching entire TV series, following long-running podcast series, reading extended Twitter threads -- suggesting that the issue is not attention span per se but rather how attention is allocated.

The comic goes on to satirize the moral panic around attention spans, suggesting that complaints about declining attention are themselves a kind of attention-seeking behavior. It references how every generation has worried that new media (novels, radio, television, smartphones) would destroy the capacity for sustained thought, and yet civilization has continued to function.

The deeper joke is about the irony of the medium: the comic itself is quite long and information-dense, requiring sustained attention to read and understand. Anyone who made it to the end has demonstrated that their attention span is perfectly adequate -- thereby disproving the very concern the comic raises. The comic also touches on the commodification of attention in the modern economy, where tech companies compete for "engagement" and where attention itself has become a scarce resource to be mined and monetized.

The final panels suggest that the real issue is not attention span but rather what we choose to pay attention to, and that the framing of attention as a declining resource serves particular commercial and political interests.