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.”