Let’s Talk About This Photo of Mark Zuckerberg Taking Over the World

Here's Mark Zuckerberg—a.k.a. Marky Mark Zuckerberg, The Zuck, The Berg, O Great And Glorious Leader Mark Zucky-Zuck, The Zucker, The Z, Zed—walking among his many charges at the Samsung Galaxy 7 smartphone launch in Barcelona last night, padding around in fresh Nikes and a gray T-shirt, a don't-bother-daddy-on-his-day-off-Luka-you-know-he-doesn't-like-eating-grapes-and-watching-cartoons-with-you specter of the end, Mark Zuckerberg plugging us all into VR, finally, Mark Zuckerberg one decade and a bout of alopecia away from going full Bond villain, Mark Zuckerberg months away from developing a bland and miserable chew-free food formula, a food we will eat through a tube while flying through space in glorious VR, humans existing in mucus-bath VR pods by the year 2026, We All Saw The Matrix:

I think we can all put our personal politics and thoughts about VR away to one side for a minute—all our thoughts about VR being 'mm, quite cool technology but I wouldn't want it to take over my life!,' which is exactly what we said about iPhones, what they said about TVs—and just enjoy this photograph for exactly what it is, which is an aesthetically glorious representation of the end of the actual world, the last flicker of deep navy and whites and blues we will all see before death encases us.

Computer, zoom in on Mark Zuckerberg's haircut, because we need to have a chat. We need to have a chat about that. We need to talk.

Now if I were a billionaire—and, believe me, be happy I am not, because no doubt I would be an evil one, there is absolutely no way I would be a good-doing or philanthropic rich man, I would start out as a fun billionaire on a yacht with a money cannon and a pet dolphin and then would get slowly weirder and more maniacal until I'd gone full Trump, so seriously, be glad there's no money in writing—now though if I were a billionaire, and even as a man who is not currently a billionaire, I care more about my hair than this man. Zuckerberg is a man who goes to a barber—or, more likely, gets a barber to come to him, at great cost—and says "I don't care what you do." Can you imagine how little this man cares about anything. "Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg's all right," you say, don't you. "He cares about things. He cares about the future of the internet. Our data is safe wi—"

"Heh," Mark Zuckerberg says, to the barber who is almost certainly being paid $500 to do this to him. "Don't just fuck me up: fuck me up so I look like I'm still retaking senior year. Fuck me up like my mom made me get a haircut for my first day at a job pushing carts at a grocery store. I am the 16th richest human alive. Fuck me up."

But now we must zoom out again and then look back at the drones Mark Zucky has plugged into the mainframe, and speculate as to how they are enjoying it, based only upon a static image, a single microsecond in time, a heartbeat frozen forever. Anyway this dude is probably looking at porn:

Or maybe he's not, but how would you know? Such is the beauty of VR. Everyone else: everyone else is just watching the same ol' VR demo preloaded into all the locked devices, watching essentially a jazzy PowerPoint demo, nothing VR about it. But this dude has the sincere vibe of having somehow figured out how to get some porn up in here. Hand on the laptop, brogues flat on the floor, sturgeon mouth: classic pornography-in-a-room-full-of-people pose. His face says: he cracked the device in the eight seconds after he was told it was under his chair. It says: he has had it porned up since Zuckerberg started talking. This is how technology truly progresses: it's not about how affordable it is, or accessible, but how easy it is to see hi-definition tits on. And he is indifferent to it.

This guy's VR console is not working and he is too embarrassed to put his hand up and say so. He's whispering to his friend like, "Is yours working?" His friend nods and he can't see it. He is alone in the infinite blackness. A Samsung logo glows menacingly in front of him. He's stuck like this for 45, 50 minutes now. He can't take his headset off in case Zuckerberg hits him with a stick. Just close your eyes, John, he's thinking. It'll be over soon. It'll be over.

This dude is wondering why he bothered bringing an SLR if he was just going to be plugged into this thing for an hour and, sidenote, is really paranoid someone is going to take his laptop while he's blacked out so has it clamped between his legs ready.

This dude does not know how VR works so he's looking behind him to see how far it goes. "Ahah!" he's saying, audibly. "Yeah, it goes all the way around!"

So I guess in essence we are looking at a real moment in time: in the grand canon, this photo is up there with the moon landing footage, the Zapruder film, Bernie Boston's Flower Power, the sailor kiss in Times Square. The exact moment a fledging future technology was revealed, properly, to an awaiting world: a future being reshaped and formed in front of our very eyes. And it really looks like Mark Zuckerberg is about to break into an evil cackle and then get into a rooftop gun fight with a spy. Later he'll say "and while all these tech journalists were distracted with a simple VR device, I launched a nuclear weapon to explode the moon!"

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And recall that we don't even know what demo the VR device is displaying. Based on the enthusiasm of the assembled masses: a screaming, 360-degree vision of hell. Fire and brimstone and terrible gremlins untold. Hell in its rawest form: lava and fire and heat and the endless infinity of agony. Nerves on fire and shrieks so high and piercing that they become a constant terror, a terror that never leaves you even when it's gone. Skins flayed and singed and yanked. Hairs twisted and destroyed. Eyes popped and throats clamped. Hell, hell, hell.

Is this the future? I don't know. I feel like we'll all enjoy VR until some wholesome YouTuber does a viral video called '#TakeYourGogglesOff,' with rhyming couplets about how "You need to take time to see your family / run in park, look at bee, look at tree" that tells us how in the good old days people used to talk to each other instead of having endless four-dimensional VR-assisted hyperwanks, and that actually, VR is bad. But this does seem like a watershed moment we will all look back on with latent terror: an, "Ah, that's when Skynet took a hold" sort of thing. We'll all be behind a chainlink fence watching a playground explode and thinking: we should never have trusted Mark Zuckerberg, with his grey T-shirt and jeans. We should never have trusted that man at all. And we will look back at this photograph, and his haircut, and go: ah, we were such fools. And go: the signs were there all along.

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