flatten-2
Explanation
This comic depicts a tech company meeting where employees are discussing how to categorize people into finer and more specific demographic groups to improve their targeting algorithms. One character says "We need to find finer categories for people to improve ad-clicks," and another notes they can keep subdividing people into categories "no matter how arbitrary."
The plan is to define features of each category and watch as people "become their own sense of self within the category, making our algorithms more effective." In the final panels, someone objects: "Nobody would fall for something that stupid." This is immediately followed by a demonstration titled "BEHOLD!" showing a category "This content is for millennials only!" and someone enthusiastically responding "I am that!"
The comic satirizes the self-fulfilling nature of demographic categorization in the tech and advertising industry. The joke has two layers: first, that tech companies create arbitrary demographic categories not because they reflect genuine differences between people, but because the act of categorization itself causes people to identify with those categories and modify their behavior accordingly. Second, the punchline demonstrates this with the "millennials" label — one of the most successful examples of arbitrary generational categorization becoming a genuine identity marker. The person who insisted "nobody would fall for something that stupid" is proven wrong instantly, as the millennial happily self-identifies with the manufactured category. It is a pointed critique of how identity-based marketing creates the very identities it claims to merely observe, and how eagerly people adopt externally imposed labels as part of their self-concept.