As artist Sam Heydt observes, the Doomsday Clock should remind us that “the edge is closer than we think. That is, of course, what the clock, as a salient piece of public art, is supposed to do: generate conversation, spark inquiry, and lead to action. Mixed with such inanity were expressions of genuine fear, confusion, and distress over the possible immanence of nuclear war. This being the Internet, there was all too much cursing and all too many oblique emojis, as well as people poking fun at the awkward staging and long stretch of silence in the video. Still, I found myself scrolling through the comments, many of them versions of “Does this mean I don’t have to pay my mortgage/bills/ taxes?” Others had lines like “Someone call the Avengers” or asked if it had anything to do with Taylor Swift’s Midnights album.
Mind you, that’s a blip compared to the videos of even minor celebrities. On TikTok, versions of this video got hundreds of thousands of “likes” and thousands of comments. Amid all the tweens trying to jumpstart the next viral craze, a 30-second video features five representatives of the Bulletin‘s science and security board frozen in place as a voice intones: “We move the clock forward, the closest it has ever been to midnight.” Then two of them pull a cloth off it and add, “It is now 90 seconds to midnight.” In its 76 years of existence, its hands have been moved 25 times, but never more ominously than in January of this year!Īnd no need to look further than TikTok to see what happened. The clock was invented two years later by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf as a way of graphically illustrating the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. It’s a deeply serious organization founded in 1945 by physicists in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When it comes to TikTok content providers, I wouldn’t normally think of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon - to the proverbial “midnight.” It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock.
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