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Book review: Janine R. Wedel, Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

Packard’s account of the emergence of a ‘commodity memory’ driven society also deserves some mention here for the timeliness of the issues it raises. The so-called ‘war on terrorism’ has led to a proliferation of data collection, information about people’s lives which is being turned into electronic profiles, or stored memory, that can be sold, shared or handed over to the US government (p. 316). The production of this commodity memory is at the hands of private companies which, although state-sanctioned and funded, impinge on individuals’ rights and privacy. In my view, the importance of this chapter lies in how it attempts to interpret this form of memory production by means of a sociological approach. Packard draws here on Marx’s commodity theory to argue that the use of the human body lies not in its labour power, but in it being a moving target, i.e. a source of information, as in the case of stored biological memory ‘such as DNA, seed, sperm and egg banking’ (p. 317). The application of Mead’s sociality theory to the study of commodity memory helps her explain how the storage of this data can be treated as an event, a moment in a person’s life to be traded between companies and government agencies. Companies buy such events, or data, in order to fill in missing aspects in a particular profile and thus identify the likelihood of an individual’s future actions. Putting together all the chapters in the book is a task that takes a lot of editorial skill. Given that the chapters were originally delivered at conferences in a span of almost nine years, it is quite an achievement to bring them together in a single volume whilst also presenting a sense of coherence, continuity and development within the field, as I think the book does. However, the book has its shortcomings. The wide range of topics covered would benefit from an organized structure classifying the chapters in terms of topics or approach. Moreover, the introduction to the book takes up 44 pages, which are mostly devoted to providing a detailed summary for each chapter. Even though the editor makes some, rather brief, links between chapters, the introduction is far too long and descriptive, and does not add coherence to the chapters, nor situate them in the field of the sociology of memory, which the book is set to represent. Even though, as the book’s sub-title indicates, what we are being offered are ‘Papers from the Spectrum’, there would be no harm in rendering some coherence to such a wide spectrum by contextualizing its contribution a bit more clearly.