[22.0] Shell sells Shell oil from the offshore

bloviate, exonerate, repeat

kk so maybe it’s extra clear now that we are all Envy’s loser polycule, straddling the death of an ancien régime and the arisal of new eras and ways of living. But some may still be unaware, and we’re not entirely to blame. Our models for the future are undergirded by terms and conditions curated for power-hoarding ends. We’ve been bamboozled :/

First, everything is on fire. Not just the jets propelling Richard “Dick” Branson’s Virgin spacecraft into microgravity! The U.S. West Coast (again), Siberia, Greece, and Turkey. One billion sea creatures literally cooked to death in the Pacific Northwest’s waters after a record heatwave in June and July. Things are apocalyptic, and yet political responses remain milky; like, electric cars won’t solve impending mass death! Air filters are becoming a luxurious necessity, too, ensuring increasingly bifurcated health outcomes according to technological access.

There are a slew of decisions that got us here. A huge chunk of our trajectory, of course, stems from fossil fuel companies having known about climate change for at least 40 years, spending decades sowing misinformation, and reaping profits. Another, less discussed, component of governments’ fumbled response to climate change—beyond utter corruption—is that the entities erected to solve our environmental apocalypse share idioms and worldviews with the corporations pushing us to our doom.

Most notably, groups like the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suffer from the corporate kink for quantifiable and allegedly empirical data. By drooling over numbers instead of observing the outdoors beyond the screen, the IPCC has actually hindered a systematic response to shitshows past and present. In A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic, climate scientist Peter Wadhams suggests that data worship begets delusion, creating scientific dissonance divorced from actual truths. The IPCC has favored computer models based on historical data over observational evidence from scientists like Wadhams. Doing so generates a more soothing alternate reality in which Arctic sea ice “only” disappears by mid-century. It’s a glaring oversight, if not a totally deceptive projection, since the ice is already gone.

“The advice of such modellers, when given to policy makers, has helped to paralyze them into inaction in the face of a climatic catastrophe which is bearing down on us like an express train,” Wadhams writes. He derides the IPCC as no less a denier of climate change than “normal suspects” like fossil fuel lobbyists or ignorant government scientists. Despite the diverging intentions and rhetoric of these factions, false prophecies sustain them all.

While it hasn’t quite disappeared like sea ice, the threat of nuclear war once loomed over mid-century minds as the most likely apocalypse to fear. The invention and proliferation of atomic bombs introduced a new form of total annihilation; mutually assured destruction was both dreaded by most and anticipated by those who leveraged such an endgame and its ontological convergence between politicians and civil society. And front and center (gripping the dais above) was Herman Kahn.

A mid-century futurist and military strategist at the RAND Corporation, Kahn developed qualitative, narrative scenarios related to nuclear war and the various realities we would face in the decades to come (nuclear, political, etc.). Kahn “reveled in the idea of preparing for the aftermath of a nuclear war,” writes Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, a history of tech’s ideological-spiritual history. And Kahn was massively influential; his bestselling book On Thermonuclear War advocated for what would become Stanley Kubrick’s “Doomsday Machine” in Dr. Strangelove. With the emotional detachment of a technocrat, Kahn argued that the U.S.S.R. would only avoid a nuclear attack on the United States if it knew that the U.S. had a foolproof retaliatory system—meaning the whole world would suffer nuclear attack if the U.S. were bombed first.

Throughout his push for ~*hypothetical*~ global mass death, Kahn believed in human resilience, holding onto a faith that humanity could survive whatever was thrown its way. He framed his work in religious terms: “We [scenario writers] take God’s view. The President’s view. Big. Aerial. Global. Galactic. Ethereal. Spatial. Overall. Megalomania is the standard occupational hazard.” With a worldview at once deleteriously pessimistic and quixotically optimistic, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Kahn was one of the first to gun for space colonization à la Musk and Bezos.

Much of Kahn’s work was a science-y and pokerfaced dance toward a highly subjective conclusion. Kahn orchestrated a suite of institutional affectations—a lax dress code, office events emphasizing interdisciplinarity, cool jazz blasting across cubicles—that offered the semblance of dispassionate reflection on deeply complex questions. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi provides a vignette on these techniques in her book The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War:

A 1959 photo-essay in Life illustrates the sense that the young men at RAND labored at the cusp of technological marvels. Called “Valuable Batch of Brains,” it presented to America “the first look ever taken at RAND scientists deep in thought about the nation’s security.” In all of the images, people are doing something iconically scientific: a young man in glasses, bowtie, and suspenders squints at the wingspan of a model airplane; two men bicker near a diagram-scored blackboard; […] others shuffle markers in a war game; and steepling his fingers at the tip of his nose, a tousled Kahn chews over “a complicated problem involving defense against atomic attack.” The last photo is a group portrait of the new generation of defense intellectuals: a clutch of young men in suits sprawl on the floor of someone’s private study. There are prominent visual cues that this is the mise en scene for the modern intellectual: along with futuristic chairs and a Japanese paper kite dangling from the ceiling, the image highlights the conspicuous informality of lolling on the floor while debating the life and death of the nation.

Between the lines of this organizational framework, Ghamari-Tabrizi writes, was the implication that “RAND heralded the next step in the cavalcade of great ideas.” RAND both saw and was the future.

This same blasé faith in chill smart guys’ clairvoyance found its way to Shell (the oil and gas company). Inspired by Kahn, futurists Ted Newland and Pierre Wack used his analytical techniques to sway Shell’s strategic planning. Wack, a follower of mystical philosopher Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, sought to decipher the “hidden order” of events and true essence of people, yoking military research culture to mysticism in the hopes of profiting off sudden geopolitical ruptures. Through compelling narratives about the future, Newland and Wack helped Shell predict the oil crisis of 1973, profiting where other oil companies had faltered, and benefiting from similar foresight in 1981. In the same way that Kahn presented glimpses of the “new man” through analysis as well as curating his office lackeys’ silly little tasks according to his beliefs, Newland and Wack shaped Shell’s future in their image. The future of oil and gas was seen at Shell, and Shell was what Shell saw.

Shell continues to model itself as an observer as well as a participant, seeking to understand the future and then determine it. Journalist Malcolm Harris penned an explosive (and under-discussed!) article in 2020 describing his time at a Shell conference about millennials. (A mild kicker: there were no terms and conditions attached to Harris’s attendance at the conference—i.e., no non-disclosure agreements—so he attended and reported openly/undercover.)

Execs at Shell are dying to understand what coming generations will do to their wallets, and they’re starting to greenwash their work in anticipation. “These companies aren’t planning for a future without oil and gas, at least not anytime soon, but they want the public to think of them as part of a climate solution,” Harris writes. “In reality, they’re a problem trying to avoid being solved.” One higher-up even confided in Harris that Shell sought to “get as much out of [oil and gas] for as long as we can.” And, after that, they hope to transmute from fossil fuel goliath-hood to clean energy goliath-hood, staying beefy and profitable throughout.

In its labor-outsourcing fashion, Shell invited its conference attendees to get oracular and “come up with ways Shell could see what’s coming… imagining [how] Shell would feel this ‘rise of a new [ecological] ethics.’” Some foresaw youth movements being coopted by corporations—and considered that a good thing! Others imagined Shell successfully rebranding itself through the high-visibility acquisition of clean energy companies. Channeling RAND, the conference charade obscured (or rendered “rational”) a canon of underlying beliefs. Worshipping the corporate over the collective, profitable futures over a stable one. Like the IPCC or Kahn, Shell delivered a message most loudly in whispers. What wasn’t said outright during the brainstorm yet was still understood.

But whatever. The most visible movements already seem infected by the corporate pablum dancing plague. Harris writes of prominent eco-agitation collective Extinction Rebellion (or XR):

Even the Shell antagonists at XR are friendlier to corporate thinking than their public profile would suggest. In an interview with the New Left Review, XR spokesperson Zion Lights explained that, in contrast with the consensus model of decision-making favored during Occupy, the group uses a “self-organizing system based on features of the Holacracy model.” Holacracy is a decentralized management program whose most prominent user is the Amazon shoe subsidiary Zappos.

Shell’s vision is already here. That’s so Raven :)

Groups like the IPCC, Shell, RAND, aren’t just engaging in shoddy prophecy, then. They’re attempting to absolve themselves of sins already committed in the process. If the ice hasn’t melted yet, if it can be saved, then can’t our governments and corporate accounts be saved, too? These incomplete techno-analyses suggest only a desperate faith in techno-solutions. If you’re looking at computer models to figure out where to move and survive climate change: check yourself, dammit! (I’ve heard it’s Buffalo.)

Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.