It’s okay. Lego was never your friend anyway
Corporations are not your friends.
Case in point: Lego recently refused to ship a bulk order to artist Ai Weiwei citing a longstanding policy of not directly providing pieces to those who seek to make political statements. Ai took to Instagram to declare: “Lego’s refusal to sell its product to the artist is an act of censorship and discrimination.” The more charitable interpretation of Lego’s actions, most eloquently voiced by Jay Ong, is that Lego wasn’t meaningfully restricting Ai’s freedom to make art since there are plenty of other places to buy in bulk. No matter how you look at the situation, however, it is clear that Lego at least desired some distance from a political piece of art.
In a narrow sense, fair enough. Lego is a company and can do basically whatever it wants, including not fulfilling bulk orders to Ai Weiwei. That, as noted corporate ethics scholar Britney Spears tells us, is their prerogative.
poor choices in things to care about.
Exercising that prerogative, however, has consequences. Lego’s commitment to creativity comes with an implicit asterisk. In a sense, it always has, but periodic reminders are helpful in this regard. Lego is a tool for creativity, but some creative expressions are preferred with a certain distance from corporate headquarters. So Mike Doyle’s Lego tableau about the costs of the Iraq War can be made out of the little plastic bricks, but the suits would sure-as-hell rather have nothing to do with this.
Previously in prerogative: Lego asked the UK government to retract ads opposing Scottish independence that featured its bricks. The company feared the ads violated their political neutrality.
Recently in prerogative: Apple pulled Metadata+, an app that tracked American drone strikes, from its App Store. We’ve been here before. During this spring’s justified uproar over the continued presence of the confederate flag in front of South Carolina’s statehouse, the company removed a number of games featuring the treasonous symbol from its store, even though many of them actually (#actually) used the flag in a historical sense. We ultimately live at the App Store’s mercy.
Where does that leave us? Well, right where we started. Corporations are not our friends. They make things we like, but their support for our preferred use cases is not a given. The tragedy here is not that corporations have their own interests so much as their poor choices in things to care about. Tech companies could care about so many things, but harassment so rarely makes the list. Lego could be concerned about so many things, but here they are fretting about Ai Weiwei.
Oh well, it’s not like they were ever our friends anyhow.
