Let me take you back to last year's Auckland Writers' Festival. It's May 2025, and Aotea Theatre is two-thirds full. From the balcony, the stalls are a sea of scarves and sensible shoes. A.C. Grayling: author, humanist and philosopher, grips the lectern. His voice is gentle, his vowels round.
Grayling clears his throat and addresses the theatre with measured authority:
"Disadvantaged groups - women, people of colour, gay people, the elderly and the disabled - deserve the same rights and freedoms as everyone else.”
The room erupts in applause, startling the woman next to me. She glances at me sideways and wipes the corner of her mouth, sitting up straighter in her seat.
Grayling is in Auckland to promote his new book, Discriminations. While people clap, I unlock my phone to learn more about it.
My search bar is powered by Google, because in 2021, they paid Apple over $20 billion US dollars for default search status. There’s good money in ubiquity, and even more in invisibility.
An Australian client, industry-leading in diversity initiatives, published an Access and Inclusion Strategy. The strategy identifies nine “communities of priority."
Here are the communities: people with disability, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, LGBTQIA+ individuals, older adults (65+), people with a mental illness, socially disadvantaged people, youth (12-25 years), and women.
Women are 50% of the population. Youth, 20%. Disabled, 25%. Older adults, 20%. It would be more efficient to name who isn’t a community of priority. I suppose they're the "everyone else."
In his speech, Grayling lauds the social progress of the last century, celebrating hard-won changes achieved by civil rights, feminists and gay activists. But his brow crinkles when he describes the consequences of these changes.
“Working from nine until five does not accommodate the needs of women.” Grayling explains.“Those hours are difficult when you care for children or elderly family members.”
The man in front of me nods, a thoughtful expression on his face. Tendrils of invisible ideas (child and elderly care is women’s work, this work should be voluntary) curl unseen across the theatre.
Another client is planning accessibility upgrades to their pools. It's a PR nightmare - local swim groups are furious at the prospect of losing a metre of lane space to a ramp.
I guess when you're used to an environment that works for you, one that works for everyone feels like a loss.
Once upon a time, we packed our groceries in plastic bags. Then, we realised what it was doing to the environment, and tried to do better. Supermarkets sold reusable bags, and we rose to the occasion - forgetting to put one in the boot, fretting about whether to buy another, burning with shame as our yellow plastic crinkled on the way to the car.
Until one day, plastic bags weren't an option anymore. When the law was debated, we panicked. What would people do?! Turns out, we do just fine (though I'm occasionally juggling 25 items to the car.)
The average person makes 17,000 decisions in a day. Most of those decisions are made on autopilot - our coffee order, the route we take to work, the apps we fire up when we turn on the computer. This is a necessary adaptation. If we consciously made every decision, we'd be worn out by morning tea.
Autopilot needs a stable environment to function - one that nudges us in one direction, instead of an unseen other.
Nobody voted for an extra metre of swim space. It's a decision that may not even have been consciously made. Adding a ramp needs a business case, consultation, and a debate about extra spending. Stairs were the default.
Once upon a time, airplanes, pubs, and restaurants were a haze of cigarette smoke. Then, we realised what it was doing to our health. We carved off space for smokers' areas and shot dirty looks at nearby puffers, worrying about how to protect our children.
Until one day, the smokers had to go outside. Protests filled the airwaves. It's PC gone mad! The hospitality industry will die! Turns out, the pubs are just fine (though popping out for a cheeky durry needs a jacket.)
When A.C. Grayling proclaimed that disadvantaged groups deserved the same rights and freedoms, he never got around to telling us who "everyone else" was. It went without saying. It usually does.
I move through my day assuming I can access public spaces, go to the pub without choking, and have the world's information at my fingertips. Yet without people challenging unspoken assumptions, we'd still have ashtrays next to our cutlery.
I know Google paid to be my search bar, and do no evil is a long-expired slogan, but when inconvenience faces off with power, guess who wins? Individual will is a poor strategy at scale. It's how we shift the burden of change to people with the least power, while unseen choices go unchecked.
Defaults aren't bad. Systems need settings to function. But every tradition was once an innovation, and few of the things we take for granted are inevitable. When we despair about the way things are going, the world will try to convince us there's no other choice.
I reckon that's bullshit. Shift the default, shift the outcome.
Til next week,
AM
