augmented-3
Explanation
This comic shows a person walking through a city wearing augmented reality glasses, marveling at how wonderful everything looks: "Wow! The development of technology made life wonderful. No abandoned buildings, no poverty, no homelessness. The only downside is how sometimes I trip over invisible things that yell at me."
The caption delivers the punchline: "Using augmented reality to disguise social blight turned out to be much cheaper than fixing it."
The joke is a dark satire on how society might use technology to address (or rather, avoid addressing) social problems. Instead of actually solving homelessness, poverty, and urban decay, the solution in this comic is to simply make those problems invisible through AR glasses. The "invisible things that yell at me" are, of course, homeless people -- still physically present, still suffering, but digitally erased from the user's perception.
The humor is grim and pointed. It satirizes the tech industry's tendency to offer technological solutions to problems that are fundamentally social and political. It also comments on how people already use various mechanisms (moving to gated communities, avoiding certain neighborhoods, scrolling past news stories) to effectively make poverty and homelessness invisible in their daily lives. The AR glasses are just a more literal and efficient version of what already happens.
This comic is also the third in the "augmented" series, which explores various implications of augmented reality technology.