Guns ‘n Poses

Tik Tok and the arms industry are fighting over the right to screw us all

A story of our times has emerged from Norway in the last month. One of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers Namo, which is owned by the Norwegian government, has complained that its capacity to produce more bullets is limited because it’s factory is next door to a data centre used by TikTok and there isn’t enough electricity on the local power grid for both of them. In other words, we can’t make enough bullets to supply the Ukraine because too many people are sharing dance moves and cat videos.

Even within the social media world the video sharing app is a known planet killer. One minute on TikTok consumes 2.63g of carbon which is more than twice as much as Instagram, three times more than Facebook, and five times more than Youtube. Now 2.63gm of carbon is nickels and dimes but given that 150m young people a day are spending up to an hour each on the app you then have a big problem. A lot of users means those server farms keep getting bigger and hotter and have an ever increasing carbon footprint.

I haven’t been able to find out what the carbon footprint of producing bullets is but even in the deranged wild west that is the united states I wouldn’t mind betting that Tik Tok videos are being traded more regularly than gunfire. Most of the time. But interestingly it is reported by Greenpeace that the arms industry as a whole is (again with huge irony) doing quite a lot to reduce its environmental impact, one example being experimenting with “clean” lasers over “dirty” shells and bullets. I have a picture in my head of electric tanks being driven in to battle firing carbon neutral weapons and equipped with recycling facilities whilst back on the home front the Tik Tok brigade are wrecking the planet. This is significant because most Tik Tok users are young so they cannot keep throwing cheap jibes at old people like me about how my generation has ruined the planet when they are quite literally dancing on its grave. The fact that the over sixties cannot even try and dance on tik Tok without ending up in A&E has nothing to do with it.

Anyway war calls for difficult decisions and hard sacrifices, particularly when an arms manufacturer is next to a social media server farm as it is in this case. The obvious and most ethical course of action is therefore to shut down Tik Tok immediately so that we can produce more bullets and kill more people. But this might be difficult. The Chinese Government within whose national walls the app controversially but legally sits might see this as an act of hostility and invade Taiwan. This could in turn lead to armed conflict with the United States and ultimately nuclear war. That’s a big price to pay for the right to share your dance moves.

The logic may be hyperbolical and the humour deep-drop gallows but there is a grain of truth in it. We live in an age where absurdities pile up on each other faster than Donald ~Trump’s presidential tweets. For instance (and staying with the theme of guns and bullets) did you know that the fascist republic of Florida is so under the sway of the gun lobby that not only are rifle ranges more or less exempted from pollution control, it is actually possible to prosecute, convict and fine government officials for harassing them. In terms of American mythology that’s like allowing the evil cattle baron to imprison the Sheriff for having the temerity to stop rustling.

Another absurdity that played out this month was that, thanks to a a fifteen month rotation scheme, the UN Security Council will be chaired by Russia during April. Yes, the country that has done more to damage global security than any other in the last 18 months is now in charge of overseeing it on the global stage. To revisit the earlier analogy that’s like shooting the Sheriff and pinning the tin star on the bad guy. The Ukraine government is quite understandably upset about this but again there seems to be no way of stopping it without creating a new UN world order. It’s our turn again says Russia so yah boo sucks to you. Expect more of these moral and procedural dilemmas to pile up before the world returns to something like normal. Which it probably won’t because Putin this week declared that he and the west are now locked in a “forever war” so this is the new normal. George Orwell if resurrected would say “I told you so” and scuttle back to his quiet grave in rural Oxfordshire.