Defaults, and Why They Quietly Run the World

Bob Dunn: Hey, Nathan.

Nathan Wrigley: Hello, Bob.

Bob Dunn: Well, I have a question for you.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

Bob Dunn: What do you think about defaults and why they quietly run the world?

Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Okay, so, okay, okay, I’m going to have to get my head around this. So I’m pretty good at not living with the default in terms of technology. I know my way around, let’s say, the Mac. And I know my way around, let’s say, a phone or something like that. And I’m actually pretty good at getting into every setting. Typically, when I download something, I will spend a few minutes going through every single setting and deciding if that’s right for me. But I don’t think that’s normal. I think I’m slightly unhinged.

Bob Dunn: It’s the one thing that kind of runs a lot of stuff when you think about it. It sets how things are processed, retrieved, shared, delivered, whatever. I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s think about when everybody was first getting phones, cell phones, and nobody knew how to set the ringer. So you’d be in this place and suddenly…

Nathan Wrigley: That’s still my phone, by the way.

Bob Dunn: Oh, that phone over there. Oh, that sounds like mine. It was that same annoying ringtone.

Nathan Wrigley: Cue Nathan silencing his phone in the background because it’s still got the ringer on.

Bob Dunn: But I mean, things like that, that’s just a kind of a silly example, but it’s an example of you don’t realize it till something happens or something doesn’t happen.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think there’s probably going to be a lot of problems with defaults in the near future. And I’m thinking about IoT devices. So Internet of Things devices. And I’ve kind of not got that many. There’s a lot of my friends who’ve gone really wholesale into buying every internet-connected thing that they can possibly have. So, you know, they’ve got like the interconnected… sorry, internet-connected fridge and microwave and, you know, perhaps more normally a TV, light bulbs and all of this kind of stuff. And it really does feel as if the default settings for those is not only are we going to do invasive things, but the default is, you know, we’re never going to update this thing. And so the security posture that was on that device the moment that you bought it is what’s going to be on it for the rest of its life.

And then you’ve got companies like Google who, and I’m just singling out Google because they’ve got a browser and, you know, they’re very successful and they’re an easy target to paint, things like their Chrome browser, I actually don’t know what the defaults are, but I’m imagining that the defaults in Chrome are heavily aligned to giving data back to Google so that it’s got more data, so it’s got more money and more data and more money, and the cycle just goes on and on. I really applaud people who put products out there where the defaults are sensible and user-centric in the first place. As opposed to companies that put things out there and the defaults are not quite so user-centric.

This is kind of a curious difference, I think, between North America and the EU, the European Union. I think the European Union, the way I see it anyway, is the European Union are fighting to have more user-centric defaults. So things like phones with settings in this way when you open the box and apps with data being able to be sent to these locations only in this way. You can’t ship things, for example, outside of the EU to North America unless you explicitly grant permission and all those kind of things. So I think people are waking up to these defaults and fighting back. That was a lot. I said a lot there, sorry.

Bob Dunn: Yeah, no, no, that’s exactly it because that’s what I thought about. I thought, are people starting to realize what exactly defaults mean. And, you know, it’s like, who are these people? Sometimes I think in these companies, you know, whether it’s a small company or big company, you know, who makes a decision on defaults? It’s like, you know, and sometimes it’s one of those things you’ll see some software or some app or something come out and say, well, this is going to be the default now. And of course you can’t make everyone happy. It’s like, why is that the default? Well, we did research and supposedly the majority of people, though maybe that’s not the reason why.

Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. We did research of our board of directors. And all 12 of them thought that it was a really good idea to maximize profits.

Bob Dunn: Yeah. We called our little default manager at night, 3:00 AM, sent him a message. Should this be default? Yes, turn it on. Okay, bye.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay, right. It’s done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The default manager said. I think though that we are waking up to the shipping of our data and all that kind of thing. It’s so curious though, because it’s so invisible, that layer of defaults.

The perfect example of this is Facebook. So recently, and this is tangential to what we’re talking about, but recently I decided that a Facebook group that I have had for many, many years, I wanted to get rid of it because I wasn’t making any use of it. And I thought, there’s no point in it sitting around. It’s just, you know, it’s just there for no good reason. Got these people, 3,500 or whatever people in this group that don’t interact with it in any way. So I’ll close it down. Oh, to my surprise. No, no, no, you’re not closing that group down. Why not? Well, you have to get rid of all the members first. Well, that’s fine. I’ll click on the members area and I’ll delete them all. You know, toggle a button, get rid of them all. No, no, no. What do you mean no? Got to do them one at a time.

So, oh, you mean I’ve got to go into every member and delete them one at a time? Yeah, that’s how you got to do it. So, I spent most of a Sunday, this is ridiculous, deleting members from a Facebook group until finally there was zero. And then I was able to finally, as me being the last person, I was able to leave. And on leaving, that’s when the group gets deleted, right? But it just struck me that although it’s not exactly what we’re talking about, this is an example of it. Like Facebook wants your data as much as possible over and over again, and they bury settings within settings within settings. They move them, they change the wording, they make it so that it’s really difficult to understand and figure out where things are. I mean, you try going into, let’s say, a Facebook page. I can guarantee that if you want to change the name of that Facebook page, you will not do it first time. And it should be dead straightforward. Click on a pen icon next to the name of the Facebook group or page and just change it. No, no, no, no.

Bob Dunn: Yeah. There’s very little bulk edit actions in any social media when it comes to removing stuff. You can typically add stuff fairly easy, but when it comes to removing it, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no. You’re going to have to work for this.

Nathan Wrigley: Well, they’ve become hungry on your data, haven’t they? And they’ve built entire businesses based upon our data. And maybe we’re waking up to it. I certainly hope we do. The curious thing though is we’re also sort of addicted to it, aren’t we? Because the bit that we like, we like so much that we’re prepared to sort of trade off. Okay, okay, they’re gonna change their default settings once in a while. And every once in a while I’ll need to go in and re-enable privacy or whatever it is, but it’s fine. It’s Facebook. Yeah, whatever. You know, because we love scrolling and we love seeing the stuff and we love seeing the cat picture and the calamity going on in another part of the world or the angry politician shouting at another politician. We appear to…

Bob Dunn: I can handle with more cats. That’s all I can say.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But if you think about it, the default when I was a kid, there was no such thing. Like, you bought a TV and the only default was, is it on or is it off? And if it’s on, then it’s on and you’re watching the telly, or you turn it off and then it’s gone away.

I don’t know if you saw recently, Samsung, I’m about to say this like it’s true, and I think it’s true. Samsung recently got into a lot of hot water because it turns out that if you’ve had a Samsung smart TV, it’s been listening.

Bob Dunn: No way. I saw that.

Nathan Wrigley: And they’ve been apportioning… so, it listens, and it identifies and classifies the kind of noises going on in the background. So, you know, was that a cat? Was that a human? Now, I don’t know if the content of the words that you said went, but the thing is it’s been phoning home by default. Like, does anybody expect their TV to do that? Sinister as fuck.

Bob Dunn: That’s why they call us smart.

Nathan Wrigley: Really sinister. If you actually went back 50 years and told somebody a story that in the future there’ll be TVs and they’ll actually be listening to you and then sending that information back to some corporation where they’ll sit on that data and figure out how to market to you and all that, they’d go, no, that’s insane. That’ll never happen. And here we are.

Bob Dunn: More appliances that become smart or so-called smart are going to do that. And they will be set on default and nobody will, I mean, most of the times when you see somebody has discovered a setting, they say, they’ll put it somewhere on social or something and say, did you all realize this is set as default? So go now into these 36 submenus and way down at the very bottom after you’ve clicked. That’s true. You can see this thing now that you never would have discovered, and you better turn it off because it’s doing this.

Nathan Wrigley: But also, not only is it hidden in a menu in a menu, but you read it and you think, what even is that? Is that the bit that I’m after? Is that the bit that I want to stop?

So when I was an Android user, I ended up using apps which would get in the way of the default. So I would use apps which would deliberately hijack things that would be phoning home. I mean, I still do use Android, but I’ve got a, you know, an inferior old phone, so it’s not one of your more modern ones. But the point is, all these apps were phoning home all the time with location. You know, you download an app which, I don’t know, it’s a recipe app or something, and you get into the weeds of it and you think, this knows where I am. This is a recipe app and it knows where I am. And then you think, just, is there any scenario where a recipe app needs to know where I am? Okay, well maybe it needs to know that I’m in a country which speaks English so I can serve it English text instead of French text or something like that. But no, no, no, no. You just set that. You just say, I’m in England. You know, you don’t need an app to do that. And it’s going on all the time, all this kind of stuff. And it’s scary, Bob.

Bob Dunn: Yeah, they’re giving us more control, but we have less control.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s the feeling I’ve got.

Bob Dunn: And it’s one of the things I noticed, and I was in something the other day looking through a setting, and, you know, it was one that was obviously toggled on or off. And when I read it, it didn’t really make sense how it was toggled on. It was something about, is your podcast private or public? Or I can’t remember how it was worded, and I looked at it and I thought, okay, it’s on, but the way this reads it, it sounds like if it’s on, it’s private, but it hasn’t been private. So they’re not making that very clear. Even if you do find a setting that’s set as default, is that, you know, wait a minute, did that suddenly get changed? I, you know, better change this. And then you end up changing something you shouldn’t have changed because it’s always been that way.

Nathan Wrigley: You’ve got to imagine that that’s done deliberately. Because how easy would it be to have a toggle where when it’s on, the text of the toggle, let’s say the description underneath what that toggle is, changes. So, okay, you’ve switched it on, which means that you’re, you know, whatever it is, you are now in private mode or whatever. You’ve switched it off. That means we are now, you know… That would be so straightforward.

The worst examples of these that I can come up with are cookie banners. Not banners, but, you know, cookie prompts. So, some of them are dead straightforward, right? You go, you know, you click on it and there’s an accept, reject, whatever, and you click reject or whatever you want to do. But some of them you can’t reject. You have to go to the preferences and, oh my Lord. I am talking several hundred, if not thousand sets of toggles that you have to go through one at a time because each of them is getting data from your phone shipped to them. And it’s like, it’s a recipe app. Why is my data going to, you know, cyborg.org in wherever it’s based in the world? And then another one and another and another and another. And there’s no simple way to just go, off, all off, thank you. And so I’m now at the point where I just think I’m not using that service anymore. That’s just too weird and dodgy. If your business model is selling data, my data, then I’m going to question that if I’m not getting much out of it.

Bob Dunn: The customized cookies is totally insane, that option. It’s like you’re just going in a rabbit hole and they make it a rabbit hole. One time you do it, you go, oh geez, I’m not going to do that anymore because that took me way too much time and half of it I didn’t understand anyway. So defaults are very, very interesting.

Nathan Wrigley: I think also when you confront defaults just in the real world that have got nothing to do with technology, I’m trying to conjure up an example here, but an example might be you go into a restaurant and you sort of say, can we sit over there? And they go, no. And you’re like, why not? Oh, well, no, we would like you to sit here. It’s like, why? And this whole thing back and forth goes on. That’s a really poor example, but you know what I mean? Where you’re confronted with, but the policy is this. So we’ve got to stick with the policy. But the policy’s dumb. Yeah, the policy is dumb, but we’ve got to stick with the policy. That’s also infuriating. If I was an employee of a business, I guess you’re going to stick to the default policy, but sometimes those real-world situations exasperate you as well.

Bob Dunn: Yeah, yeah. And then you fall back on your own defaults, your personal defaults, which is, you could call it habits or you’re in a rut, but you always want to do something a certain way. And when it gets flipped on, it’s like, whoa, don’t freak me out here.

Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any good defaults? Do you have any defaults that you’re happy about?

Bob Dunn: Defaults with my life or?

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, let’s go with that.

Bob Dunn: I think for me, we always do the same thing. We pretty much end the day at the same time. I’m in a position where I can do that. I don’t have to be going back to the computer late at night a lot and stuff. So I end at the same time. We kind of have this thing we do when we end the day and we, you know, we’ll watch an old movie and we have dinner around the same time and those things. And it is a default. It’s a default. You know, and there’s certain foods each week, you know, certain foods that we just like and it’s, it works. You know, some people might say it’s a rut or whatever, but it’s your default and it makes you feel comfortable and it makes life enjoyable.

Nathan Wrigley: So I guess from that, what we draw the conclusion of is that really we love defaults in that regard, don’t we? We don’t like them when they’re mysterious to us and they’re a little bit, that’s somebody else’s defaults impinging on my life, but our own defaults are quite comforting.

We’re recording this and it’s beginning of November and obviously what have we got coming up? Christmas fairly soon. And whilst I don’t really enjoy the default of advertising and all of that kind of stuff, I do enjoy the default of Christmas, you know, the routines that our family has come up with, which probably wouldn’t work for everybody else, but it’s what we’ve got and we’ve done it for years and we’ve slowly kind of morphed into this habit that we repeat over and over each year. That stuff is what makes life living in some regards, isn’t it? You know, the comfort of certainty and the comfort of knowing that this thing is going to repeat itself and that you enjoy this and it’s going to happen again. And that’s very, you can cherish that.

Bob Dunn: Right. And you’re choosing that default yourself and not be forced by somebody else’s default that that should be what you do.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This is apropos of nothing and it’s a bit weird, but I have a default of no socks if it’s possible not to wear socks. I’ll go barefoot wherever it’s possible. I don’t know why that is, but every morning, for about 8 months of the year in the UK, I don’t have to think about that default. And then about now, it’s about this time of year, I’m suddenly confronted that my default might not work for a few months. You have to flip it on. It’s getting a bit cold. And it’s like, oh, can I overcome the default today?

Bob Dunn: But you know it’s there and you can change it. If you want. That’s nice.

Nathan Wrigley: Well, the default becomes socks.

I’ll tell you what has been an interesting one for me is the making. So I went for years and years and years taking no exercise, basically living off the youth that I thought my body still had in it. And then suddenly realizing one day, just sort of looking in the mirror, like every person of my age does, looking in the mirror and going, yeah, it’s looking more round than it is flat, isn’t it? It’s all got a sort of curve to it now. And then thinking I need to get some exercise, getting that default set up was tricky. But I’ve now kind of figured out with more or less anything in my life, if I give it 2 weeks, I don’t know why that number, but 14 days, thereabouts, if I maintain the thing for that amount of time, it becomes the default. My body and my mind stops thinking that’s not normal, and it begins to think that’s the default.

So an example might be if I sat down and decided at 9 o’clock every day, I’m going to read an actual book. For 2 weeks, I’d toy with that. And if I stuck to it for 2 weeks and was disciplined, after about 2 weeks, it would be weird not to do it. And so it was with exercise. I’m not saying I’m fit and healthy or anything like that, but I’m certainly better off than I was. It became a default just by brute force and keeping going.