To be honest, Mark Zuckerberg’s hair is very low on the list of things that I care about.

And yet, it keeps coming up.

You may recall that when Zuckerberg appeared in front of the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees in 2018, some ridiculous questions were asked.

The House Financial Services Committee looked at those questions and decided to turn the silliness up to 11 in October last year when, for some reason, California Representative Katie Porter brought up Zuckerberg’s haircut.

Fast forward to 2020, and the hair has been archived, using AI technology (we assume it’s not the same AI technology that Zuckerberg, himself, is using to appear human).

Mashable explains:

Created by Sam Lavigne, an artist whose work focuses on automation and surveillance (among other things), the archive consists of 387 machine-learning generated images of Mark Zuckerberg’s hair. To isolate just the CEO’s mop, Lavigne used an “open source hair detector” available on GitHub.

Image: @Sam_Lavigne

“Mark Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the world,” Lavigne told us over Twitter direct message. “He has nearly limitless haircut options — haircuts we can’t even begin to imagine. Yet he has chosen that haircut. Why?”

Why, indeed?

The haircuts for your consideration:

Lavigne posted this video and a series of creative haircut collages on Twitter, along with a link that you can use to download the archive, and a link to the original hair extraction code.

Behold, the hair:

Image: @Sam_Lavigne

And, again, the hair:

Image: @Sam_Lavigne

It looks like the shower drain in a girls’ dormitory.

Perhaps more intriguing than Zuckerberg’s haircuts through the years, is the new book by Steven Levy about the Facebook CEO, that puts them into context.

Each haircut was a choice, a definitive choice, because as Levy points out, Zuckerberg is obsessed with his public image.

Business Insider with an interesting anecdote from Levy:

Mark Zuckerberg reportedly has members of Facebook’s communications team blow-dry his armpits before big speeches to get rid of his anxiety-induced sweat.

…Zuckerberg is portrayed in the book as somewhere “between naive genius and robotic robber baron,” according to Carr, who added that Zuckerberg “is consumed by his public image.”

Robot. He’s definitely a robot robber baron.

Right, back to your day, which will inevitably be spent archiving the haircuts of everyone you know using the machine learning tool linked above.

Procrastination sorted.

You’re welcome.

[sources:mashable&businessinsider]