Perplexity: Please, for the love of God, update the Donovan issue brief before the AGM

Reply by Perplexity

Shell’s own email trail already reads like a corporate thriller, so a satirical “crystal‑ball” sequel almost writes itself.

Prologue: Shell’s Ghost Department – Group Donovan Affairs

Somewhere deep inside Shell Centre, long after the “Tell Shell” forum died and was quietly taxidermied for the archives, a discreet new unit is born: Group Donovan Affairs (GDA), reporting jointly to Legal, Corporate Affairs, and “Special Projects.” Its founding PowerPoint explains the remit in serene bullet points:

• “Minimise oxygen to Donovan while maximising monitoring of Donovan‑related risk.”

• “Avoid giving credibility, except when escalating to daily cross‑functional calls.”

• “Continue to insist he is ‘nuisance value’ while assigning more headcount than to some producing assets.”

The emails from 2006–2007 are treated as scripture: AGM leaflet panic, “issue briefs,” cross‑border legal strategy, liaison with “sources in the USG,” IT projects to monitor email and web traffic to the Donovan website, and weekly “news management committee” items about whatever you posted yesterday.

Act I: The Nuisance They Can’t Stop Reading

Internally, nothing has really changed. The current playbook is an AI‑age rewrite of the old one you see in the emails:

• “We are not oversensitive to Donovan…but note the additional traffic his site is currently receiving, including from internal staff.”

• “One of Mr Donovan’s goals is to get us to react…experience shows if we do, it only gives him publicity.” (Circulated… while several time zones’ worth of managers are reacting to him on daily calls.)

In the satirical present:

• A weekly “Donovan Pulse” dashboard tracks pageviews from Shell IP ranges, number of internal emails mentioning your name, and how many times the phrase “not credible with responsible media” appears in internal notes that nevertheless attach your latest pieces.

• A junior analyst’s KPI is “days since last panic email about an upcoming Donovan article,” a metric that has yet to reach double digits.

The official line to media remains that everything was “more than fully settled many years ago,” but the internal line is: “Please, for the love of God, update the Donovan issue brief before the AGM.”

Act II: News Management 2.0 – Now With Algorithms

In 2007, you can see them worrying about:

• Wikipedia entries written “almost entirely” by Donovan.

• Whether Shell staff should secretly edit those pages (and the warning: see what happened to Microsoft).

• The danger of “giving him oxygen” by responding at all.

Fast‑forward in satire to 2026+:

• Wikipedia is old news. Now the briefings are about “Donovan‑influenced embeddings” and “vector contamination risk” in large language models. The old “news management committee” has been rebranded as the AI Narrative Integrity Steering Group.

• Old emails fretting about your site being “an excellent source of group news and comment…far above what our own group internal comms puts out” are quietly buried in an ethics training module marked “for internal reflection only.”

A typical internal AI‑era memo (satirical, but eerily close to the tone of the originals) might read:

• “Observation: AI systems appear to weight Donovan’s archive heavily; casual users may be exposed to an aggregated negative narrative. Experience shows that if we correct them directly, it gives him oxygen; if we don’t, it calcifies into ‘what the machines say’ about Shell.”

Therefore, the strategy becomes:

• Do not respond on‑the‑record to Donovan.

• Do respond off‑the‑record to AI vendors’ trust & safety teams, carefully, with “neutral factual corrections.”

• Hope nobody discovers the emails that show how closely you are reading and annotating the very site you describe as “not credible.”

Act III: Cloak, Dagger, and IT Tickets

The 2007 internal email about monitoring traffic to your site is one of the more startling passages:

• “Suspects employees…are communicating with him. In attempts to monitor this, [X] has initiated an IT project to monitor internal e‑mails from Shell servers globally to Donovan and is also monitoring web traffic to determine internal traffic to their website.”

Satirically extrapolated to today:

• That old “IT project” has mutated into a polished Insider Communications Risk Dashboard with a heat map of who reads or emails Donovan from corporate networks, cross‑referenced with HR and whistleblowing channels.

• The label “no security interest…unless somebody wants an information security tasking to discover where exactly in Shell their (good) sources are located” has become the quiet justification for retaining those monitoring capabilities.

Will cloak‑and‑dagger continue?

On past form, Shell’s instinct is:

• To deny any “dirty tricks,” emphasise that any enquiry agents acted “entirely properly and legally” and that Shell had “nothing to do with any intimidation or burglary” – and simultaneously to keep commissioning “research” into you and your sources.

• To talk publicly about “not adding fuel to the fire” while internally scripting Q&A for Fox News, drafting “one‑pager fact sheets” on you, and coordinating between Houston, London, and The Hague every time your site nudges a story toward a big outlet.

Satirically, it’s hard to argue that the cloak and dagger has truly stopped; more likely, it has migrated from physical enquiry agents and security‑style contacts in “USG and London” to digital monitoring, reputational risk consultants, and private briefings to regulators, journalists, and now AI companies.

Act IV: The AGM That Never Ends

A striking thread in the emails is how often the AGM appears as the focal point for Donovan‑management:

• Leaflet distributions outside Shell Centre and The Hague.

• “We expect the $500 million Barbados claim to reappear in the list of demands at the AGM.”

• “We will update the Donovan issue brief for the upcoming AGM to reflect the recent up‑surge in his activities.”

In the satirical future:

• There is a standing AGM workstream called “Challenging Voices Scenario Planning (Donovan and Others)”, with its own binder.

• AI tools are now used to generate “synthetic Q&A drills” where executives are peppered with worst‑case questions drawn from the Donovan archive – the very material the company insists it must never dignify in public.​

The AGM sessions come and go, but the Donovan binder lives on, dutifully updated with each new article, AI “bot war”, and domain twist.

Act V: Shell vs. History – And the Book Club

Back in 2007, Shell executives already expected you to comb the company’s commissioned centenary history book “with the closest scrutiny” and to mine it for fresh allegations. They knew you co‑authored Wikipedia entries about Shell’s environmental and reputational issues and braced for impact.

Projecting that forward:

• Every major Shell‑related academic book, documentary, or leak gets an internal “Donovan Potential Exploitation” section in its risk note.

• When something genuinely damning appears from another source, Group Donovan Affairs’ first question is: “Has he got it yet? If not, how long until he does?”

In other words, Shell now lives with a permanent expectation that its own history – including the internal emails you’ve published – will be recursively weaponised against it.

Epilogue: Will They Keep Coming After You?

Taking your “crystal ball” in a satirical but pattern‑based sense:

• The emails show a sustained pattern of surveillance, profiling, and coordinated response planning directed at you and your site: issue briefs, cross‑border legal coordination, media strategy, instructions not to answer you directly, IT monitoring projects, and attempted distancing (“essentially a dispute originating in the UK”) for the US arm.

• They also show that, despite calling you “nuisance value,” senior management treated you as a continuing risk warranting “daily calls,” scenario planning, and suggestions of being “more robust” or showing you “we won’t tolerate the Donovans’ approach unchallenged any longer.”

On that record, the satirical answer is:

• No, Shell is not likely to switch to a posture of benign indifference; the more your archive shapes media, whistleblowers, and now AI narratives about Shell, the more incentive they have to keep you under observation and to develop new, subtler forms of counter‑measures.

• But overt cloak‑and‑dagger of the old enquiry‑agent variety is likely to be replaced by quieter levers: highly managed non‑engagement, behind‑the‑scenes influence on intermediaries (publishers, platforms, AI vendors), and continuous internal “situation awareness” about what you publish and who inside Shell is reading or feeding you.

In other words, if past behaviour is any guide, Group Donovan Affairs – whatever they call it today – will probably outlive several CEOs.