The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth, and Equality. By Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 328p. $99.00 cloth, $31.99 paper.

when the architecture of disclosure may support democratic goals and where instead it might threaten them. In neo-liberal democracies, Marichal argues, where the liberal consumerist self is already all-important, the architecture of disclosure adds little to the well-entrenched politics of identity. I can “like” any number of just political causes and my network of intimates will legitimate this political performance by “liking” it (and therefore me) back. The pitfall is that this political act, cast as an identity performance, risks an over personalization that will fail to connect to the “impersonal structural forces” (p. 14) that underpin any just political cause. I “like” the lone warrior combating inner city poverty but what I really need to do is act to confront the structural violence that entails that poverty. In contrast, Marichal submits that in totalitarian states this same architecture of disclosure may actually liberate the self and allow for otherwise impossible break-through mobilizations: “While Facebook’s encouragement of a ‘retreat to the personal’might be a problem inWestern democracies, it is exactly what’s needed in totalitarian regimes where ‘problematizing the self’ might be an important corrective to regimes that do not regard ‘the self’ as important. The architecture of revelation might be a problem unique to liberal societies” (p. 126). Yet I am not so sanguine. While liberating the self is no doubt fundamental in a non-liberal society, I am not convinced that the architecture of disclosure allows users to break through self-ingrained communitarian politics to actually arrive at a free self. Indeed, Facebook’s very connection of intimates may drive users not towards the self but instead back to communitarian identity. We hope that Facebook will liberate the self in order to ultimately allow for instrumental and policy-relevant action. But all too often it instead seems to encourage the user to further align with their communitarian order and its underlying (and often self-destructive) identity politics. I don’t properly react against those in political power that are failing to govern because I am a Christian from the South, or a Kikuyu not a Luo, or a Sunni not a Shia. Identity politics further trumps instrumental politics and the connections and disclosures of Facebook play right into that. Now for a few nitpicks. The book is poorly edited to the point of distraction. Case in point: “Facebook is primarily a world fueled by which feelings and emotions” (p. 66). What? In one paragraph on page 125 I desired a follow-up on two of the citations; I then turned to the bibliography in the back only to discover both references absent. Marichal routinely references a study he undertook of 250 politically oriented Facebook groups. While he calls upon the study when it suits his purpose, we are left mostly to speculate as to exactly the methods and overall results of the research. His most significant overview reads: “Throughout 2011, I conducted a content analysis of 250 politically oriented Facebook groups. Using Google Translate, I examined Facebook groups from 32 different countries in 23 different languages” (p 13). I am a stickler for methods so I wonder: What was his sampling approach, his coding method—what are the overall results? I am otherwise left tomy darkest worry: that he has cherry picked from the study when it conveniences his argument and has otherwise ignored everything else. The above notwithstanding, the good in Facebook Democracy far outweighs the bad and there is much to appreciate about this text. Additional sections of the book detail other fascinating ways that Facebook intersects with the political. For instance, Marichal gives a nice treatment of some aspects of the Arab Spring, there is a full chapter attending to privacy, and more. Marichal helps us understand that Facebook relates to democracy in different ways and in different contexts due to definitive design decisions that this corporation has made in its own interest. If I am to remain at all optimistic, it is only that I believe Facebook need not be the social media platform for all people and all time. If the architecture of disclosure represents specific engineering choices made for specific corporate purpose, then why can’t we instead create “an architecture of democracy” that serves the public purpose? Facebook Democracy does not contemplate this architecture of democracy, let alone tell us how to design it. But it leaves me seeing no other choice but for citizens to collectively begin the processes of building one. The alternative is indeed a threat to public life.