Why would an oil company want to give you coffee and free wifi?
Because normalcy is powerful, and disruption is too.
This spring during Austin's South by Southwest festival, I found myself outside of The Shell House: an event space with free food, coffee, and wifi sponsored by Shell oil, a company that spends in the realm of 98% of their cash expenditures on oil and gas expansion. I spend most of my working hours thinking about the power and influence of fossil fuels, but at that moment I was still perplexed.
What good does giving out a free drink to creatives do for a company that spends billions every year drilling for oil? Why would they want to host concerts with little-known bands? What's the power of snacks and wifi?
I think the answer is slightly subtler than than greenwashing, or making the company look clean. What Shell wants is normalcy. They want to be seen the way every other company at SXSW was seen, from crypto wallets, to craftily named food products, to snazzy tech products. They wanted to be a part of the routine life of business in America.
Normalcy is powerful. We are surrounded by daily habits and experiences that have routine structures. The meanings of these structures are unique to each one, but they all share a subtext of continuity. Repeating a routine, seeing familiar faces, colors, brands - all of these say in a quiet voice: "everything is normal."
Watching a sporting event: normalcy. Corporate conferences: normalcy. Movie premieres: normalcy. Repeating these public routines give our lives a sense of rhythm and stability. The things we see and do within them take on that The subtext they cultivate is that nothing dramatic is changing.
In many ways, this is good. Routines are part of building a life. Living in upheaval is exhausting. But, repeating these rituals has political meaning too.
For example: I think part of the reason that there was an unprecedented racial justice uprising in 2020 was that every ritual of normalcy that we have - going to the grocery store, press conferences, sporting events, etc. - wasn't happening. Into that space of absent normalcy rushed all kinds of radical ideas. It was easy to believe that everything needed to change in the total absence of all of the practices that signal, in one way or another, normalcy.
(We were also in a collective moment that [at least for a brief period] made the idea of social solidarity more front of mind, there had been several waves of mobilization prior that prepared people for action, and many other factors contributed as well, obviously).
With any luck we won't be returning to a total shutdown of society. But we do face urgent crises that require urgent change.
If your goal is to cultivate a widespread common sense that we are in a moment of transformation, the first step is to start interrupting the public rituals of normalcy that powerful people rely on. If Shell can't routinely appear in public, if they can't perform the standard rites of being a business, it is harder to believe that we need them.
Not every interruption is equal. Disruption can be tailored to make it create specific kinds of stigma. Disrupting Shell's party would have different impacts than blocking the nearby highway. But even though they don't have a specific target Just Stop Oil's actions at sporting events are effective in part because they take something of relatively little significance (the outcome of a game) and turn it into an opportunity to say something important (a conversation about the power of the fossil fuel polluters).
Eventually, all forms of protest can become routine, as anyone who has attended too many marches at your local City Hall can tell you. Figuring out the right way to de-normalize the institutions that need to be de-normalized will require ongoing creativity. Real power is more than the ability to offer wifi and a free concert without disruption. But sometimes making it harder to show up without a fuss being made can make it harder to exercise influence.