What Mark Zuckerberg Knows About The Interior Monologue And The Future Of Facebook

An interior monologue is never fully “interior.” There are rather plenty of signs in the external world that it is taking place or has taken place; in the more obvious cases, a dazed facial expression, or perhaps some nervous or irritated movement that signals a “wrestling with an interior lie.” In the senate hearing, this exterior “body language” does not get formally highlighted, but, informally, it can easily be the stuff of senators' imaginations, the stuff of their daydreams, or the daydreams of those dazed-looking aides and others that sit behind them. The problem, for Mark Zuckerberg, is if a senator's imaginative speculations and daydreams about his interior monologue and body language yields accurate insights into whether he is telling the truth to the committee, or even what exactly he is lying about. Let us remind him then, after thinking on Deleuze: “Be aware of the other's daydreams!”

Mark Zuckerberg himself, of course, most probably knows about the informal power of the imaginative senator who seeks the most “stifling” and formal of moments in his or her career to imagine or daydream Mark Zuckerberg's interior monologue, right there and then when the world is watching, in order to get at the important truths or lies that Mark Zuckerberg is wrestling with within the confines of his mind. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg knows that for some, to imagine or daydream his interior monologue is the highlight of a career. Or he knows the irony: the ones sitting behind him, bored and daydreaming and not vested with the authority to pose questions to him, are at that very moment having the most accurate visions by which to pose actually illuminating questions to him. 

The purpose of Facebook's leading question “What's on your mind?” is, in a manner illuminating of Facebook's drive to publish private matters, to render readable precisely the interior monologues of its users. And Facebook's concern is not just any interior monologue, but the one that goes on within the minds of people at the most critical juncture, event or crisis of their lives. One day in the near future, if Facebook is used seriously, obediently and completely, every element of the user's interior life will be rendered exterior and public in every situation the user is in. That model of Facebook should be the inspiration for the senators posing questions to Mark Zuckerberg in any future hearing.

In what way was the leadership talking to the fighters in the jungle?

The Nepali jungles are nondescript, without signs that explain the names of birds, the names of trees. Such jungles would not have been sought in the war. If that is so, the ever present twigs and leaves must have failed to impress the fighters beyond the first few hours of excited walking in it. How, in that nondescript space, is there the possibility to provide a frame of reference to the critical concepts that had to be understood for the war to continue?

How does the leadership itself, given day after day in the jungle, not get distracted from what were once firmly held definitions of concepts? How is some idea like political power to be communicated here? What exactly is to be taken as the object rendition of power? What we come to is the idea of the "heaviness of the sign": a single sign-board explaining names of birds and trees comes to represent many various ideas and concepts; a single sign-board in the jungle, if ever encountered, has thousands of meanings.  

But also, perhaps the sun that peeps through at times is power; perhaps something else which causes pain, perhaps in the first moment of a gunshot wound, a leader comes up and says to the injured fighter: “Son, that is power. You have felt power. That is what power feels like.”

Will Driverless Cars Succeed In Roadless Third World Countries?

One day, perhaps very soon, companies will attempt to test driverless cars in Nepali roads and in other third world countries with rough roads. What will be tested is not the performance of the car's engine, but rather the software in the car which seeks to replace the human driver. This test-drive of the driverless car is a big leap, because it threatens to make unemployed the professional human drivers of taxis, buses and such.

Given the possibility of many people becoming unemployed, it is therefore right to expect attempted disruption of the driverless car experiment, a disruption at the highest political level in Nepal, a disruption which in fact may already be occurring, for the lengthy supposed maintenance/construction-work going on in roads of Nepal could be meant precisely to stall the possible test-drive and subsequent introduction of driverless cars in Nepal, by making it increasingly difficult to locate smooth, 'normal' roads for test-drives, by making Nepal increasingly 'roadless.'

If driverless cars do come into operation everywhere however, the romantic-emotional attachment to a road that a human driver feels while driving home from work to his/her family at night will slowly fade because the human driver will see the road as being a path between compounds of megafactories that span the length and width of whole cities, as around him driverless cars will be making long errands between those megafactory compounds without accident or exhaustion; and so, the human driver, with megafactory spaces all around him even in his drive home, will never actually leave work behind during his/her drive, he/she will always be “surrounded by work,” and will find no roadside attractions like restaurants for truckers or museums for a quick break. Similarly, the weekend drives taken with family members will in all likelihood be considered too strange with the driverless car's "voice" as an unwanted companion; and so, driverless cars will ultimately be used as cars for going to work and not for vacations or long exploratory road-trips.

From Neutral Territory to No-Man's-Land: Nepal's Involvement In “War-Tourism” Through Trenches

We know that it was possible for certain small countries to remain neutral during World-War 1 and World-War 2. In more recent times however, the closest thing to being neutral during a major war is to be a “No-Man's-Land,” which is to be uninvolved in the battle but not exempt from being on the line of fire. Whereas the ultimate decision-makers of a nation's neutrality were the citizens of that nation itself, in the decision to make a nation a No-Man's-Land, external more powerful nations are in-charge. So in one sense the transformation of a nation from neutral to No-Man's-Land has to do with the loss of the ability of its citizens from taking and implementing firm decisions regarding the situation and significance of their own territory.

In the case of Nepal, which would greatly benefit from being neutral in any war, its quite recent experience with war will be emphasized by more powerful nations to suggest that it can cope with or handle the event of a major international war. However, the violent recent history of Nepal will not be emphasized too much, because too much emphasis on that violent history will encourage Nepal to participate in major war by choosing one side, when in fact Nepal is most important in the major war context only as a No-Man's-Land.

The conversion of Nepal into a No-Man's-Land is evident in the many road construction projects ongoing in Nepal. What Nepali citizens believe to be improvements on their roads are rather the construction of World-War-esque trenches, for possible trench warfare between more powerful nations which could begin at any time. International war that occurs these days will be dislocated from disputed territories, in a kind of “war-tourism” when a nation advertises its trenches as ideal for foreign armies to conduct warfare. But the fate of Nepalis is to suffer collateral damage, as bullets meant to hurt a non-Nepali will fly dangerously through Nepali territory.

Post-Rhizome Thinking: Farmers Beyond Deleuze-Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari's famous celebration of the rhizome, after borrowing the concept from science, has made the studies and intellectual projects conducted by Nepali farmers and agriculture-related groups more scientific/science-centric: in Nepal we have much scientific research into chemical pesticides, the mechanics of irrigation techniques etc. In post-rhizome thinking however, there is the need for farmers to understand a crucial logical inversion regarding their work-environment: the farmers need to understand that the soil on which they plant their crop is not the nourishing element to that crop, rather, the soil is nothing but the fragmentation of the roots of the crops they plant; the soil is the remnants of the death of the crops they plant and have planted.

With this post-rhizome logic, the Nepali farmer may be able to position the crop's root as origin of soil, and present the landowner with the argument that it is the farmer's crop, and the farmer's toil that crop represents, which composes and creates arable soil. This logic will make the landowner face the fact that his soil is dependent on the crops planted on it, that the value of his land depends on the fragmentation of the roots of the farmer's crop.

Thus the farmers' groups can engage in studying the history of the soil of their arable lands, in order to then evaluate whether that soil has been enriched and nourished ever since planting by farmers began on it. They need to see whether the introduction of human planting on the soil had made the soil even more receptive for plantings in the future, and whether human planting caused the increase of the monetary value of the soil over time. These are not properly technical-or-scientific studies, but rather historical studies of the soil on which farmers plant, with an inclusion of scientific-agricultural methods of soil investigation inside a farmer's social change agenda.  

Entertaining Climate-Change Summer Movies And The Post-Climate-Change Age

We see on news channels quite long broadcasts of climate change conferences. Perhaps in the summer we are most anxious about global warming and need some sort of entertainment as a small distraction, either a creative conference or a summer action-adventure movie. Also, the climate-change conferences' participants devise ways to make the conference's message of “Care For The Earth” more entertaining, in the hope that the message will be memorized in the viewer's memory. Then there is the production of big movies on the environment, and watching them we may say that climate change will be a dominant issue, precisely because saving the earth will be so last minute and desperate that we will almost see an “action-adventure” movie in real life with a cast of climate-change enthusiasts.

What must be done in order to ensure a happy ending to our climate-change action adventure is a careful evaluation of the “heroes” of the climate-change movement: to see whether they are strong enough, brave enough, when the climate-change issue really comes to focus. That the climate-change movement will be so “last minute” means that there will be heroes involved in the movement rather than calmer street protests. The climate-change heroes must be identified soon, and celebrated as heroes and not just as participants in a mass movement.

It is hard to accept that the climate-change hero will certainly be effective, because there is no human-like “enemy” or “nemesis” in the climate-change movement of the future, rather nature itself will occupy the position of nemesis, which means nature itself will have to be attacked and destroyed completely, like the adventurous emptying out of the sea if the sea-levels get too high all of a sudden and leads to desperation. This means there is no turning back to the past, to pristine nature, to the way things were, in the climate-change movement; the world will not look/revert back to what it once was in the post-climate-change age.

The Nepali Pastor: Becoming-Animal To Save Stray Dogs' Lives

Ongoing knowledge-building projects makes the flock docile and disciplined; the flock's inclusion in incomplete projects makes it happy; incomplete knowledge-building turns a group of people into a flock of animals. So it is the madman, who has an endless drive to produce more and more knowledge, whose knowledge is always incomplete, who is the pastor of the flock, because the flock disciplines itself before him/her because he/she includes that flock in ongoing knowledge-building projects.

The madman is driven precisely by the desire to be a pastor of the animals, such as, in the Nepali case, the stray dogs. He/she begins in his/her ambition to be pastor by sleeping among these animals, in their territories and wastelands and not his/her own, and by the end he/she has developed a core group of stray animals which are his flock, which look to him/her for the management and protection of their territories; he/she has finally “become-animal” to use the Deleuze-Guattari term; he/she has become a stray dog, and therefore gains their trust.

The pastor begins as the madman and ends with becoming-animal. The lack of discipline among Nepali people shows that Nepali people lack pastoral power today; pastoral power has moved in Nepal from the management of people to the management of stray animals. The movement towards becoming-animal does not discount pastoral power in today's age when knowledge-building matters, rather, the pastor's knowledge may be used for improving the lives of stray animals.

It is by Nepalis' respect for pastoral power that any governmental project of killing stray dogs will be stopped, and these stray dogs can instead be seen as included within pastoral power's projects and hence in a very pure way seeking their own earthly territories, as the pastor has taught them to do just as he/she taught people before.