MYKI -- Cargo Cult?

I mentioned Cargo Cults on Facebook yesterday, and it got me thinking about the Myki ticketing system. I'm aware that this issue has done its dash as the water-cooler topic du jour, but please indulge me.

Myki could perhaps be usefully thought of as a cargo cult. For those who aren't familiar, the original Cargo Cults of the Melanesian Islands were instigated by people who wanted to spark a repeat of the massive influx of US supplies during WWII.

The people looked back at the circumstances in which supplies were last received, and tried to replicate them precisely. This involved painstakingly setting up 'airfields' -- complete with wooden aeroplanes and an air traffic controller -- which superficially resembled a US Air Force's base. Surely, if the physical circumstances of the original event were replayed, the desired bounty would return.

Everything was perfectly arranged, yet it didn't work. The Cargo Cultists had mistook the outward sign of a phenomenon for the phenomenon itself.

It seems that we're in a similar situation with Myki. Here's my guess: The people who decided to implement the system in the first place must have looked around the world, and saw many excellent public transport systems. Curiously, each of these amazing PT networks also boasted a brand-new, shiny, ticketing system.

It's now probably impossible to know whether someone held a meeting and said: 'If we change the tickets, perhaps the trains will run on time!' I'm sure nobody said it in such bald terms, because they would have been laughed out of the room.

Yet I'm not so sure that it wasn't a large factor. Consider: converting a battered, borderline-dysfunctional PT system into a substantially better one is punishingly hard and expensive. However, rejigging a single component of this system -- unfortunately, the one whose existence is predicated on all the other components functioning perfectly -- is much easier. It's still hard, but nowhere near as gruelling as making substantial improvements to trains, tracks, signals, and all that heavy infrastructure drudgery.

To see this more clearly, stop focusing on whether Myki does or doesn't work, and what you can do on it. It doesn't really matter, because even amazing ticketing systems can only provide marginal improvements to the complex, decaying system which support them. Even if Myki had worked as promised, it would still have represented a massive misallocation of resources -- the equivalent of repainting your house when its foundations have been eaten through by termites.

Thinking back, it's strange that more people didn't find the initial claims made for the system fishier. The information that would be collected, remember, was going to help the operators run things more efficiently. This is a category error, though. Fine-grained information, such as the frequency of passengers at certain times of day, is next to useless if there aren't enough resources (read: rolling stock) to redistribute in the first place.

So next time you're cursing Myki for not reading your ticket properly, don't. Instead, curse it for having been conceived at all.

Enforced patting

It's been a long time -- so long, in fact, that I'm not sure whether this blog actually functions anymore. We will see.

I'm starting this sucker up again to encourage me to write stuff down. With luck, the ideas that I'm going to throw around on here will be good fodder for articles eventually, probably published in obscure journals if I'm lucky. However, that should be no obstacle for a writer.

Anyway. Since I last wrote on here several years ago, I've lost one dog (my first) and gained another couple. This piece is based on my thoughts about one of these dogs, named Marlon.

Marlon, like all dogs, enjoys being patted. He's a dog of the 'gently roughing up' school -- nothing too precious. Yet one quirk of his behaviour got me thinking about an important difference between their consciousness and ours.

When I stop patting Marlon, he tries to force his head into the gap between my arm and my body. In other words, he will try and instigate a pat by force. In once sense, this is perfectly understandable: pats are pleasant, and all animals seek to maximise pleasure.

If this action were performed by one human to another, though, it would be profoundly odd. This, of course, is because an affectionate touch between humans only has meaning due to its voluntary nature. The sensation itself is not the point -- a hug, for example, is special not because of the physical sensation it engenders, but because of the feeling behind it.

In order to take pleasure from a hug, one must understand that one is being shown affection by another person. The gesture of a hug represents the recognition of another person as a 'being in itself', rather than a 'being for others'. (I am rusty on Satrean terminology -- if I've got this backwards, I'm sure my non-existent readers will correct me.)

The dog, on the other hand, does not seem to experience me as a self-contained being. True, he understands that I don't always do what he wants me to. To Marlon, I have more autonomy than a plastic toy or a slipper.

But I'm still not fully autonomous for him. The strange feeling that we get when we suddenly think about all the self-contained perspectives that exist in the world doesn't occur for a dog. Judged on Marlon's behaviour, I guess that I don't really exist for Marlon when I'm not standing directly in front of him. From a dog's perspective, humans resemble the radical sceptics' idea of objects: they only really exist when you look at them. After that, you cease to be a part of the dog's universe.

The enforced pat brings this home vividly, because the willingness of me to pat Marlon clearly doesn't enter the equation. It's a strange disjunction. From my perspective, I'm patting Marlon because I'm fond of him. Yet from his perspective, a pat from a patting machine that shared my physical characteristics would do just as well.

When I'm doing the patting, the illusion of two perspectives that recognise and respond to each other is inescapable. Yet as the enforced pat suggests, this may just be a human way of projecting more agency onto the dog than he actually possesses.