By John Donovan
Shell shareholder, digital provocateur, and academic instigator
It began quietly — the way these things often do.
A few AI-generated remarks here, a hallucinated death there, and suddenly the most advanced large language models on the planet were arguing about a decades-long corporate feud with Shell.
The stage? The internet.
The fuel? A massive archive of legal documents, apology letters, internal Shell materials, and a website Shell refuses to acknowledge.
The antagonist? Silence.
The instigator? That would be me.
This article is Part 2 of a series on Shell, Hakluyt & Company and Wikipedia. Part 1 sets out the basic Hakluyt story – ex-MI6, Shell chairmen, undercover work against Greenpeace. This piece looks at how that story almost vanished from Wikipedia, and ends with a more personal footnote.
(This article is Part 1 of a series on Shell’s relationship with private intelligence firm Hakluyt & Company and how that story has been handled on Wikipedia. Part 2 looks at the vanishing “Controversies surrounding Royal Dutch Shell” article and a personal footnote about my late father.)
EBOOK TITLE: “SIR HENRI DETERDING AND THE NAZI HISTORY OF ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
EBOOK TITLE: “JOHN DONOVAN, SHELL’S NIGHTMARE: MY EPIC FEUD WITH THE UNSCRUPULOUS OIL GIANT ROYAL DUTCH SHELL” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
EBOOK TITLE: “TOXIC FACTS ABOUT SHELL REMOVED FROM WIKIPEDIA: HOW SHELL BECAME THE MOST HATED BRAND IN THE WORLD” – AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.
