The Irremovable Figleaf
Reader Dan O'Connell sent me a note suggesting that the sorts of things that Wired described corporations revealing online (see yesterday's entry) are minor or self-serving at best, and that there are things that today's corporations would rather die than reveal online. The most intriguing of these is the degree to which they engage in outsourcing.
I agree, but I counter-suggest that the reason is not what we might expect: Outsourcing is almost impossible to quantify or even define, especially in an era of virtually free digital communication with near-global reach. It's not just call centers. The bulk of four-color web printing for books is now done in the Pacific Rim, mostly China. You send your print images to their servers, and your books come across the ocean on container ships a few months later. If you're not in a hurry, you can get four-color print services for half (sometimes less) of what you can get them for in the US. Sometimes only the covers are printed overseas. Often the inks are made overseas. Bits and pieces of many things are made in places all over the world. (I have had boxer shorts with little tags reading, "Assembled in the Dominican Republic." Assembled. With a set of Boxer Shorts Wrenches, I assume.) If a manufacturer buys resistors or ICs made in China to build into a laser printer made in the US, is that outsourcing? If so, how do you quantify it? How do you enforce honesty? How do you even know with certainty where the resistors came from? Book publishers send raw manuscript files all over the place for copy edits and indexing. Production files go up on an FTP site. They get downloaded. They get uploaded. They get downloaded. They get uploaded. Sometimes they are sent to production houses elsewhere in the US, which in turn may send parts to other places for specialty work. How can you track the path of a stack of 100-odd files that eventually come together into a print image? How can you ensure that none of them leave the US?
That way lies madness.
Corporations may assume (with some justification) that definitions of outsourcing and other legal but controvesial processes will be nebulous and interpreted variously, even by people not intending to use them as clubs in political rumbles. Better just to say nothing and hope that the burden of gathering data will keep all but their most determined enemies from posting something that the public (which has not been trained in critical thinking) will accept uncritically, and to which there is no response that the public (which has been trained to see reality as a loose collection of sound bites) will bother to read in full.