We Should Improve Society Somewhat

About

We Should Improve Society Somewhat refers to a panel from a comic by Matt Bors in which a medieval peasant says "We should improve society somewhat" while a modern man, emerging from a well, replies, "Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent." The comic has been popularly used as a retort to people who imply one can't make complaints about capitalism or other aspects of social life while participating in those systems. The comic has also been used as an exploitable.

Origin

On September 13th, 2016, Matthew Bors posted a comic titled "Mister Gotcha" on The Nib.^[1] The comic features a man trying to own others by pointing out their hypocrisy when they argue for improving society. He first mocks a person tweeting about how Apple doesn't pay livable wages for Chinese workers because the person is tweeting from an iPhone. He then mocks an early-20th century car owner for arguing cars should have seatbelts. He then appears in the last panel mocking a medieval peasant for wanting to "improve society somewhat" (shown below).

Spread

The comic's last panel became a popular form of rebutting arguments that people who want to improve society are hypocrites because they participate in social systems, a la the Capitalism Made Your iPhone argument. These arguments tend to come from conservative commentators and thus, the comic is popularly used by left-leaning users. For example, Matt Bors tweeted an edited example featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the peasant, though the tweet was deleted (shown below, left). On May 31st, 2020, Twitter user @HatokTalk^[2] posted an edit regarding the George Floyd Protests, gaining over 2,200 retweets and 7,000 likes (shown below, right).

NFT Controversy

In February of 2021, Bors experimented with placing the panel into the NFT market, but received heavy backlash. On March 1st, 2021, he posted a lengthy thread^[3] explaining why he ultimately decided against making the comic an NFT, saying, "I am not wealthy and you probably aren’t either. Entering some absurd market where a bit of a meme being popular could translate into the kind of money that gets my household and entire immediate family out of debt. That’s the temptation here," and, "Maybe I’d make $10 or something obscene off this. Who knows. But running The Nib without developing a complicated, or compromising, involvement in this market and all its implications are far more important to me, so I’ll be abandoning this little experiment."

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References