The clock may as well strike midnight
This is an opinion piece that has been brewing in the author's head for a number of years, ever since discovering the Doomsday Clock for the first time. It is not so much a criticism of the BAS as it is a structured venting outlet. Feel free to discuss the contents therein, but keep in mind what the position of the Clock is in this piece, and what I am trying to say through it.
Do you know the Doomsday Clock? It is a fictional clock created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, a journal that explores the negative impact of technological progress on humanity. The clock was first envisioned after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Wold War II, as a way to raise public consciousness about how close we are to nuclear winter (or rather, to borrow a nuclear metaphor, to the meltdown point where humanity is led to final annihilation due to the escalation of political tension). The clock began counting at 11:53, 7 minutes to midnight, and would purposefully wind back as peace agreements were made and barries were put in place to prevent the meltdown.
Looking at the timeline of the Doomsday Clock, we note that there have been a number of times wherein it has wound back after moving forward: in 1960, 1969, 1988 and 2010. There have been other times in the middle in which is has wound back multiple times in a row, but there is a clear pattern we can follow: it has only wound back once since the fall of the USSR, and it was not even a large wind-up, barely a minute. In the meantime, the clock has had to wind forward a number of times, making thinner and thinner cuts each time, and shifting its focus from merely a nuclear threat to address other relevant concerns, such as climate change and, more recently, the advent of modern artificial intelligence. The society frames this as a sign of extreme danger, as how we are a razor thin sigh's away from midnight, but there are a number of problems I have always found with the modern use of the clock.
The meaning of a minute has been lost to time
First of all, we need to address the elephant in the room: the clock winds back by a minute, or a couple of them, whenever significant progress is made. There is an argument to be made that there is a mismatched sense of scale for how much it takes to wind back a minute: beginning at 7 minutes may have felt breathtaking and appropriate at the time, reflecting both the existing political tensions and the subsequent anxieties of the general populace. If we move forward through the timeline, however, we see how the clock shifts away from its original context (the Cold War, the nuclear arms race) to better suit the contemporary concerns raising from a better understanding of climate change, or as some have come to name it, the climate catastrophe. (There is an argument to be made about shifting to a more critical name, but that would be redundant with respect to what this article addresses.) However, the countdown remained unchanged-- winding back would signal that things are moving forward, when in reality it is the nature of the threats that has changed.
That being said, when we compare the fact that it began at 7 minutes during the bombings and we are now at less than two, it does bring into question whether the original meaning has been lost to time. We now understand that there are two dimensions of space rather than one, but we keep measuring distances by the metre, as it may, and some of the information has been lost in translation.
To illustrate this, imagine a grid in an empty room. If you only know one dimension, you can only see a line, and move forward or backward; your position is completely determined by how far along the initial point you move. But now you unlock the ability to see in two dimensions, and can move up, down, left and right. From this point on, you can move up and down; or you can move left and right; or you can even move in a combination of these. Distance will no longer predict your position, but can only give an estimate, which becomes less precise as the distance increases. For the doomsday clock, the initial position is its seven minutes to midnight.
There is also the fact that the clock has not had a chance to wind back for 16 years. The overused metaphor of a child that has grown old enough to apply for a job and has not had a chance to see the hands move back a single second comes to mind. This means that, if we wish for the original meaning of midnight to remain relevant, we need to stop and reconsider how to further fraction the clock. We can see this in the recent timeline: we are no longer 1 minute to midnight, we are 85 seconds. The Bulletin needs to shave down seconds in order to reflect the tensions, but also to keep the clock's message relevant.
Shock sells, and everybody's buying
There is a point to be raised about the fact that some of the larger events that caused the clock to wind back are conceptually outdated. For one, the 1960 wind-up was caused by the world becoming more armed, rather than less. It was difficult for me at first to tell what the reason was when reading the statement; why are we celebrating more weapons, instead of less, at a time where the clock was born as a response to the nuclear threat? This may be a sign of how we live in a world far detached from the clock's.
But leaving that one aside, we see how the major events that have caused the clock to move are treaties, war and peace, protests. Notably absent from the timeline is the Kyoto Protocol, as they do mention climate change as one the things the Bulletin keeps track of, but they either dismiss it as empty goodwill (which, fair) or are actively diminishing the importance of the policies raised. One could argue that we cannot just judge the clock on what constitutes a windback withoout reading the statements, but it is known in journalism that most people never read past the headline. On the other hand, one could use this as an argument for how their main focus has always been a political meltdown, not an ecological one.
Those who follow the clock may notice how it began using seconds in 2017, and stopped using minutes in 2020. Reading back, it does seem like the world threats have become more dispersed and somewhat abstract: we used to worry about nuclear weapons, and now we worry about propaganda, the rising sea levels, macroeconomic currents... All that causes the clock to shave time, but we have moved onto a multifaceted and multi-dimensional threat vector, if not threat vector field. And we are informed by the second of the changes, as we are flooded by people who mourn and criticise the governments in the spare moments they have between insults to one another on social media.
There are articles and studies which address how it is no longer just convincing people that climate change is real or how we just need better technology to address it, but we also need to deal with the burnout caused by hyper-awareness. We begin learning about climate change in grade school, and while we often hear about the ways in which it creeps in and worses, very rarely do we hear about progress in contrast, because shock value sells.
Has the Doomsday Clock become another tool for shock value?
My original goal with this piece was different. I originally intended to use the Clock as a framing device to talk about desensitization to the constant influx of negative information, and how only talking about the negatives while downplaying the positives undermines the efforts of those who try to fight against the very world-ending threats the BAS tried to warn us about. I have since come into this book, which addresses this point; but more importantly, writing this piece has led me to think about the position of the clock in the modern world.
Again, I reiterate that this is not a criticism of the BAS, as the Doomsday Clock is an artifact of a bygone era where the threat was both more concrete and immediate. Given the context it was envisioned in, I think it was an appropriate metaphor for the growing anxieties of the time. But while I already half-heartedly held this belief back in the day, I now suspect more strongly that the clock has outlived its usefulness and has since become yet another instrument for shock amongst people.
I first came into the clock back when it was at 2'30'', when someone was talking about the BAS, how we are worse off now than in the Cold War days according to them, and how close we are to what they consider midnight. Hopefully, reader, you can foresee by this point why I think the clock runs the risk of becoming (if it is not already being actively used as) another tool for shock value. And the truth of the matter is that, living as we do in the era of the so-called attention economy, a big scary clock that is mere seconds from the end of the world is another way to get eyeballs on your monetized 30-minute video written by a neural network as a vehicle to drive eyeballs into your sponsors and pushing your metrics up. The name itself sounds like an artifact from a dystopian novel, which I guess is another relic of the era.
So, are you saying we should phase out the clock?
I so wish to say "no". This discusion has no doubt been had multiple times by the BAS board itself, and it remains for a reason. But in the end, I really feel like the answer is ultimately "yes". But with a catch.
There is a point in having a tangible measurement of the state of global politics, in my opinion. However, the existing metaphor is too one-dimensional, and does not accurately represent the current state of the world. If both the abstract idea of a nuclear weapon and the entire industrial backbone required to manufacture them were to vanish overnight, but it caused the politicians' zeal to increase as a result because they feel unprotected against an invisible enemy concocted by foreign nations, would that cause the clock to wind back? If the US-China tensions were to somehow resolve and the active wars were to come to a halt but it was because of a joint project that will cause a large carbon footprint, would the clock wind back?
And if it doesn't, are we allowed to celebrate?