The work.

We learned to call manipulation strategy.

We live in a world that has normalized manipulation and disguised it as smarts.

Pricing designed to distort value becomes clever pricing. Interfaces designed to wear people down become conversion design. Copy that manufactures fear becomes persuasive writing. If the numbers go up, we are taught to admire the work.

Most of us have participated in this system from both sides; we have been manipulated by it and we have repeated it in our own work. We have accepted that this is simply how business works, or even failed to notice it at all.

That is by design. Manipulation works best when it disappears into ordinary practice.

When everyone uses it, teaches it, rewards it, and calls it expertise, questioning it can make us feel naive. Not using it can look like choosing not to be good at our jobs.

We refuse that premise. Manipulation is not strategy.

It is lazy, demeaning work that asks confusion, pressure, concealment, and fear to do what honesty, usefulness, and respect should have done in the first place.

The point is not to point fingers and separate the ethical people from the unethical ones. We are all inside this system. The work begins when we learn to see it, name what it has taught us, and choose what we will do differently together.

The pledge declares our intention.

The pledge gives us a position from which to begin: the people we meet through our organizations are human beings, not targets, and their freedom to choose is not ours to engineer around.

Take it in public. Display the badge. Invite the people you serve to hold you accountable.

Take the pledge

The work is how we live it day-to-day.

The price on the page, the default in the form, the metric in the meeting, the sales target, hiring process, product roadmap, leadership call. This is where we discover how much of what we learned as good business was built on treating people as something to convert. It is also where we begin building something else.

We are here to unlearn it together.

Name the tactic. Build the flip.

Manipulation becomes easier to challenge once we can see how it works.

Our tactics and flips library names the manipulative practices we stand against, and examines what they do to the people on the receiving end. Then we turn the question around and ask ourselves how could we meet the same legitimate need without confusion, pressure, concealment, or fear?

The flips are attempts to build ways of working that respect people’s agency. Some are well established, others are still being argued over, tested, and rewritten by people across this movement.

Explore tactics + flips

Learn from others doing the work.

The Ethical Move did not begin this conversation, and we cannot see every part of it from where we stand.

Organizers, researchers, practitioners, communities, and movements have spent decades exposing extractive systems and building other ways to work. Our understanding builds on theirs.

We bring together resources from people and organizations whose knowledge can help us examine our assumptions, understand the consequences of our choices, and change what we do each day.

Explore curated resources

Show us what we’ve been missing.

We are building practical materials for bringing the pledge into organizations, classrooms, client work, and teams. We want case studies, teaching materials, workshop and slide decks, and eventually a course with credentials.

Our ambition is larger than our resources. Everything here has been shaped by people who have taken part in The Ethical Move, and it remains open to everyone who becomes part of what comes next.

Question what we publish, bring what you know, and help create the tools and conversations this movement still needs.

Share what you know