Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A salesman offers a man a device called "Last Rite-ly" — a gadget that implants into your neck and, in the event of death, electrically causes your heart to beat while uploading your soul/data to confess everything bad you ever did. Meanwhile, a compression algorithm ensures all your sins are condensed, and it releases a reservoir of holy water into your circulatory system. When the man asks how much it costs, the salesman says it is free if you sign over your user agreement. The man agrees to take it.

Two weeks later, the man is upset because the device is already selling his confession information to third parties. The man complains: "You didn't sell my confession information to third parties, did you?" The salesman deflects: "Really just meta-data, why?" The final panel reveals a note reading "You might like: more sinning" — the device is now using his confessed sins to target him with personalized recommendations for more sins.

The Humor

The comic satirizes the modern tech industry's business model of offering "free" services in exchange for harvesting and monetizing user data. The absurd premise — a last rites device that uploads your deathbed confessions — is a stand-in for any app or service that collects deeply personal information. The phrase "really just meta-data" is a direct parody of how tech companies downplay data collection by calling it "metadata," as if knowing the pattern of your sins is somehow less invasive than knowing the sins themselves.

The final punchline — "You might like: more sinning" — perfectly captures the absurdity of recommendation algorithms. Just as Netflix suggests shows based on your viewing history, this device recommends more sin based on your confessional data, completing the satirical circle where even sacred religious rituals become just another data harvesting opportunity.

References

The comic references the Catholic sacrament of Last Rites (now formally called the Anointing of the Sick), which involves confession and absolution before death. The title "Last Rite-ly" is a play on this. The "meta-data" defense parodies real statements made by tech companies and government agencies (notably the NSA during the Snowden revelations) who argued that collecting metadata about communications was not the same as surveilling the content itself.