The exact same trends go round and round in web design too (and now apps).
At first things were square (because that was all the technology could do) then in the 2000s CSS exploded and everything went colour gradients and rounded corners, just because people could, then that became old-hat and everything went flat and square again, and then rounded came back (but without so many gradients)
Everything is cyclical.
Those meme email chains were annoying at the time, but kinda endearing to look back on in retrospect.
I kept getting added onto ones my mum and dad were getting from a bunch of their friends that had people’s random corporate/work email addresses included and stuff…
It was a simpler time, when boomers hadn’t discovered social media yet, and were making their own fun without Facebook and without the algorithm.
If someone offered me a chance to magic social media away like it never happened, and the price I had to pay was unfunny memes spamming my inbox, it’s a price I’d pay gladly.
Execs aren’t hell-bent on anything apart from making money.
If they could replace every job in the world with AI (except their own) then of course they would, but they can’t because AI cannot do every job.
AI cannot stack supermarket shelves. AI cannot make coffee. AI cannot wait tables.
But AI certainly can produce pictures and text and music - to some questionable degree of “quality” - and so it’s these creative jobs which are being stolen.
And that’s exactly the irony the comic is pointing out. The creative things are what humans actually want to do, but those are the very things we are being replaced in.
The real dress is actually blue and black, yes, but the illustration tries to show how the exact same colours can look different depending on lighting and context.
In the diagram, the dress on the left is strongly blue and black, while the dress on the right is strongly white and yellow.
And yet the connected parts of the dresses with the “pipes” between them show the exact same colour on one dress can look like a different color on the other. The “pipe” is there so you can follow it with your own eyes from one side to the other and observe that it is indeed the same colour on both sides, despite looking very different when observed as part of the whole image.
The point being, how our brains perceive colour is very situationally dependent, and some people assume a different situation than others, hence the differences in perception.
People tend to believe that vision is absolute, that we all have the same eyes and see the same things, but that’s absolutely not true. The dress phenomenon occurred because It’s not about what your “eyes” see in absolute terms, it’s about what your “brain” does with that information.