Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

hive

2018-04-14 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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hive
Votey panel for hive
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Explanation

The Joke

A human encounters a strange alien species and observes their civilization. The aliens have built cities on Earth, but the human notes that these cities appear to be organized like a hive -- their constituent beings are "low-green" entities that seemingly lack individual identity. The alien confirms that their organizational structure does not allow them to relate to other beings on a "personal" basis. They have no intrinsic sense of individual well-being and measure everything through collective eusociality.

The human finds this bizarre and alien, but in the final panel the perspective flips: the alien looks down at Earth from space and says "We like the term 'hive-tocracy,'" implying that from the alien's point of view, human society -- with its emphasis on personal success over collective good -- is equally strange and perhaps dysfunctional.

The Humor

The comic works by setting up a classic sci-fi trope where a human judges an alien civilization for being a mindless hive collective, only to reverse the lens. The punchline operates on the irony that humans, who pride themselves on individualism, might look just as peculiar (or just as eusocial in their own way) from an outside perspective. The word "hive-tocracy" is a portmanteau playing on "hive" and a suffix suggesting governance, underlining that what we consider normal social organization is just another form of collective behavior. It is a typical SMBC move: using an alien encounter to satirize human self-perception.

View History (1) Original Comic