realize
Explanation
This comic shows what appears to be a meeting or presentation setting. One character asks a profound question: "Do you ever realize suddenly, and with awful clarity, that we've become incapable of communicating with each other except through corporate-owned, algorithm-curated platforms to subsume our identities, expressed via corporation-owned social networks designed to behaviorally addict us?"
The response in the next panel is someone sharing a "surprised Pikachu" reaction meme -- and the final panel shows the shocked/surprised Pikachu face.
The humor is devastatingly self-referential. The character articulates a genuine and alarming critique of modern communication -- that we can only express ourselves through corporate platforms using pre-packaged memes and reaction images rather than original thought. The punchline proves the point instantly: the response to this profound observation about our inability to communicate authentically is itself a meme (surprised Pikachu), which is a corporate-owned image used as a substitute for genuine emotional expression. The comic demonstrates exactly the problem it describes. The surprised Pikachu meme is particularly well-chosen because it's used to express shock at an obvious or predictable outcome, adding another layer -- of course our response to learning we can only communicate in memes would itself be a meme.