Steve Jobs, Porn, and Corporate Moral Responsibility

When it comes to corporate moral responsibility, the media is consistently double minded.

Steve Jobs, one of the most inspired visionaries of our time, is more than just a businessman–and Apple is more than just a business.  From an early age Steve Jobs set out to run his own company and build products with a culture infused into them.  Jobs’ culture appreciates beauty, embraces creativity, and challenges its users to live a life of simplicity.  It’s the culture as much as the product that Jobs is selling.

If you want what he’s selling, you play in his world under his terms.  He is king of the empire he created, an empire in which most people happily participate.  The numbers are staggering. Apple’s iTunes marketplace, which supplies apps, music, movies, books and other media to Apple’s line-up of blockbuster media products, such as the iPod and iPhone, has over 125 million users and in the last ten years Apple’s market cap value has soared from $4.8 billion to $231 billion (an increase of 4,700%).  Today it has overtaken Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technology company.

But Apple is more than just a technology company, Apple is a culture all its own.  Jobs shapes Apple’s culture of simplicity, cleanliness, and liberation.  He considers the entire process from product conception to launch.  His goal is to keep the culture of his product pure, clean from the clutter that slows down traditional PCs, and to ensure that Apple’s brand remains strong.  Not only does he oversee the development of the product, but he also sets the terms by which others can interact with and develop for Apple technology.

And Steve Jobs hates porn.

Jobs sees porn as enslaving and thus anathema to the culture of liberation built into Apple and its products.  As he said in an e-mail to Ryan Tate at Gawker, his goal is “freedom from programs that steal your private data.  Freedom from programs that trash your battery.  Freedom from porn.  Yep, freedom.  Times are a changin’ and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away.  It is.”

Jobs anti-porn crusade is incidental to his goal of spreading (or selling) Apple’s culture.  When Jobs sat down with his team to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the myriad of other technologies for which the company is renowned, he likely did not build them in order to build technological walled gardens to block out porn.   In other words, ridding the world from porn was not his ultimate goal.  Rather, Jobs saw an opportunity for a future market filled by a new kind of revolutionary technology, he went forth, and he created.  The popularity of his creations proved Jobs right again, and again, and again.

Jobs’ crusade against porn has raised the ire of porn consumers who feel his “imposition of morality” entirely unfair and unjust.  Style magazine Dazed and Confused goes so far as to scornfully call their iPad version the “Iran edition,” making a comparison to the Muslim theocracy and the rules of the iTunes store.    The “Apple chilling effect,” as it is becoming known, required the magazine to remove nipples and other body parts from their content.

Dazed and Confused isn’t the only publication to fall victim to Apple’s decency policies. The app “Gay New York: 101 Can’t-Miss Places” has been rejected several times due inappropriate content.  As one journalist put it, “the problem here is that it’s awfully hard to assemble an authentic guide to ‘Gay New York’ when Apple objects to content as innocuous as a well-muscled guy in a thong…”  The obvious conclusion here is that Jobs is to blame because he feels Apple has a moral responsibility to keep indecent content off its technology.

I think it is more condemning of gay culture than Steve Jobs that a New York gay hotspot app cannot pass a basic decency test.

Here’s some hard truth: if you don’t like Jobs’ standards, don’t use his stuff.  If you’ve got to have your porn or you must have unseemly pictures in your New York gay hotspots app,  use another product.  Droid does apps.  When you’re shopping at the iTunes marketplace, you’re shopping in Steve’s world where Steve is king.  You’ve chosen to shop there; you’ve chosen to subject yourself to his rules.  Rex Lex, the king is the law.  Comparisons between Apple and Iran’s theocracy are intellectually dishonest.  The Iranian people do not have the choice of opting out of the Mullah’s edicts.  You don’t have to shop at the iTunes store.  Ever.  Not once.  Steve Jobs cannot stop you from porn consumption – he just won’t let porn into his marketplace.

Here’s where the media is double minded: if it were global warming against which Jobs was on a moral crusade, he would be a hero.  Nobody would care if Jobs prohibited apps that promoted the despoiling of wildlife habitats.  Likewise, journalists wouldn’t complain if Jobs prohibited apps helping people locate brothels in nations where sexual slavery was the norm.  Concern about global warming and sexual slavery arise from the same moral conscience as concern about porn addiction.  Hey media, let’s be honest, you don’t care that Jobs has a moral agenda or that his agenda influences his company and its products, you simply don’t approve of his moral agenda.  Please, for the sake of me, your reader, have the integrity to admit the point and the decency to make an intellectually honest argument.

*Image credit: Sigma Group* ‘