PledgeNoHate.tech – An Investment in the Future

Being of service with technology to the greater good is as much of an art as it is science. The pace at which technology changes and evolves has increased in rapidity and strength over the past 20 years, bringing enormous sophistication and automation to previously analog, dis-integrated, and time-consuming processes. In all this change, it’s easy to focus only on the next thing that is immediately in front of us: completing that code Sprint, selling the next deal for applications and services, understanding how to bring powerful new tools online, or responding to technology change in the face of global economic and political uncertainty.

It's also easy to lose sight of why many of us began our journeys in the Tech for Good world. One that ignited in the late 1990s during the advent of today’s online era with a simple idea: that with the right technology, judiciously applied, the world could change in enormous ways that would benefit others and society at large. Business leaders that serve the impact space, those global nonprofit, educational, philanthropic, and equity organizations, do so because at their core, they believe that there’s a role for the technology and services they’re offering and improving the state of the world to be brought together. One that supports a business, a staff, and creates revenue and profit, but never forgets its roots in doing good at scale.

However, as we’ve grown up as an industry, so have the perspectives on why and where technology should be applied. A narrative that sales and service of technology should be “agnostic,” to the customers purchasing it has taken hold, and done so in a manner that is placing highly accelerated tools in the hands of whomever can afford them. This narrative is eerily familiar to anyone who has lived or worked in social justice movements has heard before: that we must look at the world through a “colorblind,” lens only accounting for the next immediate engagement with another person and discounting the historical and structural context in which that person lives their life. If low-income folks can’t afford housing, it’s because they don’t have enough cash to afford a house or rent, not because they’re living in a system of outcomes that have driven highly-specific inequities across race, gender, and other factors.

In short – we’re no longer focusing on the outcomes technology produces, nor how they enforce and equally accelerate systemic inequities. We’re only focusing on the deployment of technology at scale.

This is why PledgeNoHate.tech exists: to draw attention to the fact that technology, applied agnostically, accelerates, and can bolster, increasingly inequitable outcomes. It asks businesses taking the Pledge to pause and consider outcomes by drawing a clear line, one that in the United States means choosing not to enable extremist organizations that detract from democracy, rights, and liberties in increasingly fraught and polarized times.?

Bringing it back to the motivations of many business leaders in the Tech for Good world, making the world a better place increasingly asks us to ensure that we don’t simultaneously enable the detractors from this goal, and instead of creating greater good, we stall at net neutral. Or worse, foment the conditions for democratic backsliding and the revocation of rights and liberties from others.

It turns out that anecdotally many business owners and leaders, especially in the Tech for Good world, already do some form of paying attention to these outcomes. Many are keenly intelligent and caring people who are diving in on the day-to-day with their staff and customers and have found themselves in circumstances where it was plainly visible that serving a specific customer would mean driving inequitable outcomes – be they environmental, social, or civil. In these cases, we’ve seen these leaders repeatedly step in to say some version of, “I think our means of working is incompatible with your organization’s needs, and you might be better served by a different business.”

But these circumstances are incredibly challenging for business leaders, frequently engender staff and leadership angst, and occur only on a one-off basis as they arise. There hasn’t been an easy way for any one business to spin up the necessary research, policies, and directives to help them clearly draw these lines, and sometimes these circumstances can lead to turmoil for the business. Sometimes these businesses also must choose between feeding their staff and getting caught up in a potentially reputation-damaging engagement with a customer.

Why is this so? Some of the problems these businesses have expressed include the following:

• How do I understand extremism in the first place, and the outcomes it drives?
• How do I make a decision with reasonable parameters on whether or not to sell/service a customer that may be enabling extremist outcomes?
• How do I not paint a target on my business, which might have negative effects on my ability to pay and support my employees?
• What do I do with an extremist organization that may already be a customer of my business?
• What promise do I give my staff, especially staff from underrepresented and underestimated communities, that through their employment at my business they won’t be asked to enable customers that detract from their communities, rights, and liberties? If business leaders see this contradiction, then front-line staff sees it even more clearly.

PledgeNoHate.tech is designed to be an iterative solution to these questions, one that strives for actionable attention on behalf of participating businesses while creating a community of businesses that have a demonstrated backstop against enabling extremism. Displaying a PledgeNoHate.tech badge, which is renewed yearly, means that a business is seeking to accomplish the following in response to the challenges around enabling extremism, beginning in the United States:

• Alleviate any one business from having to decide on its own the parameters of what constitutes extremism.
• Create an educational community of practice amongst business leaders towards understanding how extremism manifests, its goals and outcomes.
• Leverage the Southern Poverty Law Center Extremist Files, specifically its Extremist Groups list, as an easily referenced, academically rigorous backstop for preventing the enablement of extremism.
• Create a public community, along with daylight and transparency, for technology businesses that choose to prevent extremist outcomes in their work.
• Provide internal and external enablement and marketing for businesses who take the Pledge.

A single business grappling with extremism is a target. An empowered community of business leaders and a wide variety of businesses proudly taking the Pledge is a movement that creates its own momentum and outcomes.

We must begin somewhere – and begin in a community of peers rather than trying to understand the nuance and pitfalls of extremism on our own. Taking the Pledge means clearly identifying that we will no longer be agnostic to the outcomes technology drives, and we’re committing to a journey of understanding that enabling extremism and outcomes that detract from people and democracy is far different and more impactful than simple ideological disagreement or freedom of religion and speech.

This is especially relevant for impact organizations – those whose work and values align with increasing rights, access, democratic participation, and net-positive outcomes for individuals and communities. Impact work is driven foremost by partnerships and values, and secondarily by the resources available to these organizations, including the systemic ones that necessitated their creation in the first place. Businesses taking the Pledge are also making a statement that they are partners to the impact organizations whose work balances the scales in the United States by clearly stating that they won’t enable detraction from this balance.

Technology will continue to accelerate in both capability and functional ubiquity. In the early days of electrification in the United States, things like voltage, delivery mechanisms, infrastructure, and current type mattered immensely. Until electricity was declared a public good, cities and regions faced a myriad of feature and function choices as electrical systems came online. Technology, in aggregate, is maturing beyond the time when feature and function are the differentiators – it is becoming an expectation and a standard, and a de facto public good, just like electricity.

However, there are any number of land use, zoning, and legal regulations that prevent me from simply plugging in whatever, however, I want into residential and commercial electrical grids. The perspectives of any given Homeowners Association, City, County, and State matter a great deal because what we plug in can have harmful effects on my neighbors and community. Similarly, what we do with technology matters, and the outcomes it drives can no longer be considered separate from its raw accessibility.

What does a business get when it takes the Pledge?

• First, a starting point. The SPLC Extremist Groups list is less than 100 organizations in the United States, but it is not a static list. It changes and evolves as extremism does, so a business taking the Pledge is stating that it will start to better understand the context in which its technology and/or technology services are being applied.
• A community of peer businesses, and with some attention and intent, a community of leaders engaged in understanding extremism.
• The Pledge is a foundation for the future. One in which businesses have agency over how their technology drives future outcomes, including how they leverage it to align with consumers and customers, build on staff trust and belonging, and talk about it as a means by which to achieve greater outcomes.

Finally, the Pledge itself is not a perfect entity, but like calculus, it seeks to understand outcomes at scale. It is launching as a yearly membership for good reason: businesses cannot simply, “set it and forget it,” in how they operate. But rather than focusing on the which and why any singular extremist organization has become a technology customer, it focuses on process and procedure as its drivers towards annual renewal.

By design, the Pledge does not ask your business to divulge if and how you’ve sold to an extremist organization, but it does ask you to divulge how your business is enabling better understanding of extremism, what teams are involved in ensuring the conditions of the Pledge are met year-over-year, and where you are changing your processes to accommodate the Pledge – including off-boarding any identified extremist organizations. The Pledge itself will face conditions of scale – it’s a different ask for a business that is 5-10 people as compared to a business that is 500-1000 people in size. We’re all learning together, and more important than targeting each other in a world of extraordinary nuance is empowering each other to understand this nuance.

Most encouraging are the businesses who have taken the Pledge who are already asking, “Why aren’t you doing more?” and “Why does the Pledge only leverage a single condition in order to be met?” These are leaders whose personal and business perspectives are already considering things like the effects of discriminatory hiring and laws, individual actors who are donors and Board members with an agenda to foment extremism, and the safety of their staff in a multitude of geographic and social circumstances. They are on the vanguard of thinking of these as interconnected systems – where we put money, how we enable rights and liberties, and what these systems create at scale can be influenced by making small and important systemic choices. The future of the Pledge relies on these businesses as much as it does those who are taking their first steps towards understanding extremism and wanting a means of clearly stating this as a corporate value. It will grow and iterate over time, which suits the yearly membership model, but its fundamental promise is that this growth will be an inclusive one, with multiple onramps and what will hopefully be an empowered and content-rich community standing behind it.

You and your business are no longer alone in understanding, and taking a stand against, extremism. As consumers and customers, especially impact organizations in the United States, that are purchasing technology solutions and services, there’s now a starting point and public statement for you to know if the technology business serving you is truly enabling your work.