The promise of Corporate Social Responsibility was that through self-policing, business would find ways to manage the externalities that it creates, be they environmental or social. However, the backlash against CSR has meant that instead, businesses are continuously reacting to changing landscapes, rather than proactively managing their engagement with CSR.

In online technology, a religion of ""agnosticism,"" has taken hold - that tools, platforms, and services are equivalent to things we take for granted, and should be sold as such like cars and electricity. However, the fundamental difference is one of scale - online technology creates enormous reach, beyond the actions of any one individual consumer or customer. As such, the outcomes it accelerates are equally impactful at scale.

Because technology can be harnessed to create wide-scale change in our society, culture, and government, what ensures that these outcomes aren't creating deleterious effects? In the religion of technology agnosticism, there is no backstop against using technology at scale to foment democratic backsliding and the revocation of access, liberties, and rights.

Technology businesses are left to decide for themselves what customers they can or should work with, and thus are left to make consequential decisions in isolation: a circumstance that both makes them easy targets for extremist organizations to cry foul, and one that enforces a ""hands-off"" approach to selling technology.

But this is failing - both the businesses themselves, and customers and consumers who are increasingly attentive to outcomes driven by online tools. Can we imagine a better way, and what are the preconditions and enablement necessary by which to do so?

This presentation/discussion will reflect on the first months of PledgeNoHate.tech, and the anecdotal and factual lessons learned along the way towards creating a new piece for the CSR puzzle, one that focuses on stopping the enablement of extremism with technology.