social
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents a darkly humorous take on pandemic-era social isolation policies. In the opening panel, a figure in what appears to be an authority role explains that during a pandemic, they cannot just bring students back and accept the consequences. Instead, they use "social network analysis to pick the right people." The middle panels reveal the methodology: they identify each social cluster, find the person who is least socially connected (essentially the person nobody would miss), and silence them "one at a time." A character then asks, horrified, "Oh so Rominson we just take unpopular lonely people and bring them back first?" The authority figure confirms: "Precisely."
The final panel delivers the real punchline with a twist: the response is not that these unpopular people are brought back to campus first because they are expendable, but rather that a department has been formed to handle this -- revealing that bureaucratic machinery has been built around this cruel logic. The absurdity escalates as institutional efficiency is applied to what is essentially a system for ranking people by how few social connections they have.
The Humor
The comic satirizes several things simultaneously. First, it mocks the cold, data-driven approach institutions sometimes take toward human welfare -- using "social network analysis" sounds sophisticated and scientific, but the practical outcome is essentially identifying and exploiting lonely people. Second, it plays on pandemic-era anxieties about reopening policies, where real debates occurred about which groups should return first and what level of risk was acceptable. The joke takes the utilitarian calculus to its logical and horrifying extreme: bring back the people nobody would notice if something went wrong. The humor is characteristically SMBC in its willingness to follow a dark premise to its uncomfortable conclusion while wrapping it in the language of rational policy-making.
References
The comic was published in May 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when universities and institutions were actively debating how and when to reopen. Social network analysis is a real field of study in sociology and data science that maps relationships between people in groups.