Flight of the Midwich Cuckoos
Ziz and the burden of bourgeois genius
Meet the kiddies
For The New York Post, the recent murders attributed to a Silicon Valley cult called Ziz and its guru, Ms. Jack La Sota, are yet another symptom of a nation corrupted by a precious yet steely egalitarianism. At least that’s the macho Murdoch pose. Charging a stealth takeover from the coastal fringe, the Post and its ilk ignore the fact that the cult members are essentially products of the middle class’ freedom of choice. Nurtured—and finally neutered—by the American Dream and its discontents, their descent into a weird woke techie Mansonism is a start-up gone wrong. And they are Californians. In California, magic and wishful thinking make dreams more real than biological life. Dark nostalgia, too. For the good old-fashioned US doomsday cult waits at the end of every yoga mat, dressed in missionary black or sashaying in a dhoti. Everyone deserves their own dream. Life is a dream.
Dreams less sweet are now most common. The Ziz kind is a typical hotchpotch of New Age psychobabble, cranky dietary and game theory, monumental American brute selfishness. But unlike bigger brands such as Scientology, Zizianism is still in a stern infancy which despises worldly reward. You can see it in La Sota’s mugshot. Like a modern Cotton Mather, enraged integrity pours out of sleepless eyes.
The idea of exceptional, brilliant kids banding together is an aging man’s nightmare. Running wild—a wild innocence that sizes up parents with virgin contempt and disdain. Their unpitying eyes judge the historic failures of nervous adults: the lame excuses used to justify a lifetime of groveling, control-freak impotency, bottled violence and hyperallergic guilt. The terror of giving birth to mediocrity maddens the family man, especially in wealthy Caucasian temperate zones. When they shoot up the township school or go on a gang rape, bourgeois children are still brilliant. Ziz and Co are brilliant still, even the right-wing tabloids admit it. Never letting his offspring forget they carry superior genes, Daddy humiliates and spoils them to death [i]. The results are as predictable as entertainment. The child is the target. For the grown-up child, the landscape that shaped him is the target.
The Guardian calls the Zizians “a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists” who met online and talked anarchy. This description would not work if Ziz were merely a great tradesman or a model teacher. As for anarchy, Ziz’s gang are not really political but rather marshmallowy libertarians who want to be free to make a big mess and call themselves by funny names. At the center is the enigmatic Ziz Herself, a pronoun-shifting sorceress whose blog of paranoid word salad, Sinsicerely.com, was the ideological umbilicus of the tribe. Like the best cults, the goals remain opaque but we can identify a few major preoccupations: diehard veganism, terror of rogue AI, changing the human brain, and gender theory. All pretty trendy, but Ziz’s real innovations lie simply in pushing the synthesis of the twee and the ultraviolent to new operatic heights.
Their mortal enemy is an obscure thinktank called Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), which espouses a philosophy with a boring old name—rationalism. The group has a distinctly Golden State aura which combines old world crankiness with holistic self-improvement guff; they take pains to distance themselves from outright Nazis like Curtis Yarvin or oligarchs like Peter Thiel, but the patter is not too different. Rather than hip postmodernism, CFAR is all about “reductionism, materialism, moral non-realism, utilitarianism, anti-deathism and transhumanism. Rationalists across all three groups tend to have high opinions of the Sequences and Slate Star Codex and cite both in arguments; rationalist discourse norms were shaped by How To Actually Change Your Mind and 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong, among others.” Forget pouring over dusty books by Berkeley and Hume, CFAR rationalism goes for digital thought experiments, concepts lifted from junk like Dune, and a mild whiff of do-gooderism.
They did not start off as enemies. Jack La Sota, A.K.A. Ziz, was once a fervent admirer of CFAR’s work (which, it has to be admitted, seems mostly to consist of hermetic blog posts). Things began to go awry when Ziz’s gigantic ego feels increasingly bruised and sidelined. He blames it on pure envy and a shocking prejudice against trans members. Aside from Ziz, the besieged trans community of CFAR included one Gwen Danielson, whose theories of multiple personalities gel nicely with Ziz’s conviction that the brain’s hemispheres are in mortal opposition (hence we all have two genders, but this Manichean split must be embraced to achieve unity). Such ideas probably came off as dark and trashy. It’s the stuff of alien abduction or Sybil, and CFArians are way more concerned with behavioral economics and being uploaded to eternal life online. Ziz and Gwen remain steadfast but calm, perhaps hoping for a slow mass conversion. Or maybe they were planning a coup. Sectarianism is definitely in the air.
While still under the club’s banner, Ziz comes up with the idea of putting together what he calls a ‘Rationalist Fleet’, a navy made up of tech geniuses who, freed from skyrocketing SoMa rents, would float around the San Francisco Bay and save humanity by refining such difficult concepts as '“anti-ethics", "dichotomy leakage", and "timeless gambits". This daring philosophical adventure, a revival of the libertarian fad for Seasteading to dodge oppressive taxation, healed some of the doctrinal and gender-exclusivity wounds at CFAR. Ziz and Gwen may be a little odd, but at least they were now on to something more practical. Ziz also forms links with another pseudo-thinktank: the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, supposedly an AI watchdog. We shall have more to say about MIRI and its intellectual strongman, Eliezer Yudkowsky, in the second part of this story.
Alas, the Rationalist Fleet comes to naught. After this devastating let-down, Ziz becomes convinced its failure is due to the fact that the rationalists are secretly fascists, and less secretly, ‘cis-supremacists.’ Ziz and Danielson part ways with CFAR acrimoniously, swearing vengeance. From now on, it’s cis- versus ziz- supremacy. In 2019, Ziz manages to get arrested protesting the annual CFAR con. Ziz’s group of upstarts scream at both the undernourished IT nerds and the burly cops; someone claims they are armed. No gun charges are leveled after the arrest, but Ziz accuses the police of severe abuse while in custody—which is hardly unlikely, given the cops’ rabid dislike of anything they perceive as rich-kid louche degeneracy. "I will actually never be able to trust society, even in a limited respect, like trusting cops to not torture you for literally doing nothing wrong, again,” Ziz declares in court records. The protest and subsequent horrorshow are the final insult. Ziz transitions again—this time from a run-of-the-mill transgender seafaring vegan with multiple personalities who opposes dichotomy leakage into a frothing Jim Jones in flowing Darth Vader robes. Sporting martial threads, Zizians are now true militants. Their new prepper-preppy doomsday slant strangely links them to more conservative American apocalyptic movements from the Millerites to the Branch Davidians. This is historically and geographically unavoidable. Far from being a bastion of ultraliberal quasi-socialism as the Right often claims, California has always had a deep strain of Mormonism at its roots. Reaching the end of the frontier at last, reaction makes a stand at the sea and rolls back inland with the mechanical tide.
Next time: Roko’s Basilisk, samurai sword fights, Ziz faces the music!
[1] Killer children remind us that horror and comedy are identical. The possessed demonic child is also Denise the Menace, Skippy, or Opie. Squeaky Fromme even looked a little like orphan Lilian Gish, while the rest of Charlie’s girls were prom queens with swastikas for stars.
So good! Thank you for covering this.