Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This is a long-form SMBC comic exploring a dystopian future in which technology progressively erodes all boundaries of personal privacy and autonomy, told through a series of escalating scenarios narrated by what appear to be anthropomorphic frog/lizard characters.

The comic begins with relatively familiar near-future concerns: technology that gradually injects new fetishes into your personality via targeted content, and AI companions that offer emotional companionship while being owned by corporations. It then escalates through increasingly absurd violations: eSports being reclassified so that accepting a Terms of Service agreement binds you for 45 minutes of mandatory content; augmented reality becoming so pervasive that it is impossible to avoid corporate branding in your visual field; and your body itself being considered a "violation of Terms of Service."

A key recurring theme is that each new technological intrusion is presented as an extension of trends that already exist today (targeted advertising, mandatory Terms of Service agreements, data harvesting), just pushed to their logical extreme. The fractal metaphor from the title suggests that the pattern of privacy erosion repeats at every scale -- from browsing habits to physical bodies to neural activity.

The comic escalates to a scenario where private feelings begin to "seep into public" and formerly private thoughts become exposed. Characters reference embarrassing private moments becoming public, and the notion that "nothing is private anymore" is taken literally.

In the later panels, an alien or robot civilization decides that the most appropriate response is to take every human, knock them out with electromagnetic pulses to the brain, and sort them into "vacuum fluid for complete category deprivation" -- essentially a total reset of human identity and categorization.

The final punchline undercuts all the dystopian gravity: when a character is given a chance to utter their last words, they say something crude or trivial. Then another character simply says "F*** it, kill them" and a robot agrees to "kill Tulsa" -- suggesting that even the cosmic judges of humanity are ultimately as arbitrary and petty as the systems they are replacing.

The comic is a satire of the "boiling frog" theory of technological privacy erosion -- each individual step seems minor or acceptable, but the cumulative effect is a total loss of human dignity and autonomy. The fractal structure of the comic itself (each panel introducing a new layer of violation that mirrors the previous one at a different scale) reinforces the title's metaphor.