iCensored: Apple, Porn and the Magic of CSR

Is social responsibility just a nicer way of saying social control?

Consider Apple CEO Steve Jobs' response yesterday to a question about whether the App Store would remain a closed platform.  Instead of highlighting the company's decision to impose even more draconian limits on app developers, Jobs explained that the iPhone would continue to be restricted solely to pre-approved apps because Apple does not want have a store where "your kids can download porn."

It is indeed true that some have praised the App Store's banishment of apps with sexual content as a way to keep its products child friendly, a necessary step for the iPhone and iPad to scale as educational tools.  However, the company has also come under fire for corporate censorship, not just for violating the ideal of free speech but suppressing socially beneficial apps pertaining to sexual instruction and health.  In addition, Apple has been accused of using the safe-for-kids argument as a cover for anti-competitive activity, with the primary target in the war against unsigned apps actually not being porn, but decidedly unerotic apps from Google, Adobe and emerging businesses that could pose a threat to Apple's iStore iMonopoly.

It's a familiar story to anyone who has studied moral campaigns in American business.  In the 1950s, for example, comic book companies adopted the Comics Code, a set of child-friendly standards that today is generally decried as censorship and a transparent attempt to drive publishers of more mature comics out of business.  However, in its heyday the Comics Code was a paradigmatic expression of corporate social responsibility--a way for the comic book "industry" to "measure up to its responsibilities" by making comics "a unique and effective tool for instruction and education."

Whatever one's particular stance on unsigned iPorn, kid-friendly comics or the oil & timber industries' war on hemp, such controversies highlight a systemic weakness of the the contemporary CSR movement: namely, the facile nature of its ethical claims.

The same fundamental principles used to justify going green and other forms of progressive corporate do-goodery also underly campaigns for business to adopt practices that many social entrepreneurs would decry as censorship, repression or theofascism.  Moreover, we have yet to come to grips with the extent to which CSR is thriving because of the magic moral transformation it performs on what are at base strategies for throttling both established competitors and the startups of the future.

If we want to make the world safer for our kids, perhaps the most important challenge we face is finding better reasons to be good.

Photo credit: SteelSoul