Fetish For Finale: The Doomsday Clock
An observational rebuttal to the fear-mongering of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
By Claudia Berdella
According to the latest statements from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist, the Doomsday clock which supposedly shows how close we are to Armageddon is at 85 seconds to zero hour. As of January 27, 2026 their Security Board announced their placement of the hand. Headlines reporting on the news give an air of immediate imminence; fear inducing propaganda, claiming the position of solid authority on the matter… As if the clock is not a mere arbitrary monolith and hasn’t been reset on numerous occasions.
Sarah Starkey in her written press release for the Board quotes a 2021 speech from CEO and professor Maria Rose to illustrate the given message:
“Without facts, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no trust. And without radical collaboration this this moment demands is impossible. We are living through an information Armageddon— the crisis beneath all crises— driven by extractive and predatory technology that spread lies faster than facts and profits from our division. We cannot solve problems we cannot agree exist. We cannot cooperate across borders when we cannot even share the same facts. Nuclear threats, climate collapse, AI risks: none can be addressed without first rebuilding our shared reality. The clock is ticking.”
Not wrong by a longshot at face value: global tensions are at a fever pitch, and AI directly feeds into climate issues. However, what is this, if not fear mongering? What is this if not an insincere voice regarding a fetish?
Since humanity developed knowledge regarding its own mortality, paired with the Upper Paleolithic ‘creative revolution,’ evolving an overactive intellectual capacity and biological prerogative for self preservation, high is the likelihood that apocalyptic scenarios have been around as long as any semblance of society has.
Terror Management Theory, as presented in the book Worm At The Core: On The Role of Death In Life— or Ernest Becker’s ever poignant precursor The Denial of Death— is the highlighted absurdity within the death-wish. Similar to a suicidal individual, doomsday scenarios are a hypothesized form of symbolic ego gratification. A monumental moment, then it’s all done. In the individual person this is delegated to self-esteem (ego) and romanticism of the human condition in comparison to the vast scheme of universal existence. Essentially the basic thought process in such is that at least you aren’t the only one dying and there’ll be nothing to miss out on; and maybe, just maybe, there’s an extension of consciousness beyond the post-Morten rigor mortis where we can all meet.
Even in the imagined end-scene, there’s a post-credit snippet. Denial of death permeates.
Say we do wipe our species off the face of the planet like in any apocalypse movie or a biblical barrage occurs and brings down perdition, what is the former but a self-fulfilling prophecy? What is the latter but deified daydreams? What is it if not a formalized fetish? Seemingly, the idea of a deathwish is encapsulated almost perfect, in both hope for and fear of an imagined end of the human world.
Albert Einstein has the famed line explaining, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” in association with the idea of a nuclear battle and subsequent fallout reducing technological advancements back to antiquity. Humanity in this hypothesis survives however. As it would seem, even if a nation like Israel decided to enact its Samson option, likely it is that survivors would still manage to straggle their way through. Atomic arsenals have obviously improved tremendously since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and undoubtedly moreso since the Tsar Bomba; so the reconstruction of societies would be more of a struggle undoubtedly from the survivors, but like cockroaches have managed numerous extinction events, humans are pretty resilient in spite of excesses.
Blaming technology is unimaginable in the face of history and human tendency. Calling it causation for increased division among people is averting the human responsibility in the matter altogether. Back in the day, union busters would bring in black workers to piss off white strikers— it’s nothing new, imposed animosity. It all merely updates to the times as, mind you, humans are the ones programming it so.
With that, powering the technological advancement in the race toward artificial intelligence, also lies climate change. Eating up resources as an energy means, but simulating not irreparable. Without humanity much issues presented would revert. The Doomsday clock merely symbolizes the end of human existence, not the Earth which has spun and sprouted life before man and will long after.
With that, what is the actual truth and fact here? The planet would objectively fare better without mankind? Highly unlikely would it be for the entirety of ecosystems to die off, even in the advent of abhorrent man-made mutilation. The end of the world is just a placeholder for The Last Hominid’s Inheritance of Extinction. Overestimating itself: humanity is and are not the sole inhabitants of the planet, nor would it be the first or last to die here.
At face value, human society is neither innately good or bad, it is and evolves as time progresses. Most every era of its existence has it been predicted the end of the world was right around the corner; soon or sometime shortly after one’s lifetime. Sure, the span of human existence is but a short blip on a pale blue dot thus far, but with that (and to paraphrase Nietzsche in his book Human, All Too Human), come many assumptions as to its qualities and characterization of its own conscious perception.
Ultimately the Doomsday clock is a ruined orgasm on loop. Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy with the Great Filter hypothesis and centuries of media from the Bible to Stephen King’s ‘If It Bleeds’, depicting a sudden stop to it all. Realistically and observationally, such is nothing more than a fetish without finish.
