I listened to this episode of Trust Revolutions (Why Ads Keep Winning) last night. Thought provoking. Made me ask:
Why do so many people choose ads with such apparent eagerness? And: why do defaults matter so much? The answer that came to my mind: people want to be told what to think and what to do. Normally, as freedom tech loving sovereign individuals, our knee jerk reaction is to lament the fact that so many people are sheep. But maybe that’s the wrong reaction. Maybe it misses an important insight. Which I propose is this: we should acknowledge that the vast majority of what we all know, or think we know, about the world is not knowledge that we came up with ourselves. The vast majority of our knowledge was discovered by someone else. Usually someone we’ve never even met. That knowledge gets conveyed to us through the social graph. And most of it that we accept as true was never scrutinized by us. Why? There’s not enough time in the day. Most of what we accept is true, we accept bc we can’t just reject everything. Of all the data that comes in through our social graph, we select the most trustworthy source among all available options, even if “most trustworthy” is still pretty crappy.
So if people so willingly, perhaps even eagerly, accept ads and default settings, it’s bc we’re doing what human beings do: pick the best of all available options. People won’t reject ads and default app settings if the alternative is to figure out everything on your own from scratch. You want me to figure out the best settings on some piece of technology I barely understand? All of them? Seriously? Sorry. Default settings it is.
So what’s the answer?
We simply need better alternatives. Better — more trustworthy — sources of information, on every topic and context under the sun. Web of trust, Brainstorm, Grapevine. It is the only way.
