by Alyssa Steinsiek
Today I’m going to tell you a story about a group of deeply troubled people accused of very disturbing crimes, and the ways in which their sordid stories are being used against our community. This is a very complex story with a lot of actors and moving parts that took place over, at a minimum, the last seven years. I won’t be able to tell you the tale in its entirety here, but I will do my absolute best to summarize it for you.
If you’re curious about the particulars, go read Evan Ratliff’s obscenely thorough story for Wired.
In 2010, a user on internet pseudo-intellectualist forum LessWrong posited his theory that an AI superintelligence would one day attain unlimited power and torture all of its detractors for all time, a la I Have No Mouth. This theory, dubbed Roko’s basilisk after its progenitor, was deemed an “infohazard,” such that even knowing about the basilisk (and failing to aid in its creation) would damn you to eternal machine torture.
Ziz LaSota, despite first dismissing the idea, later found that she couldn’t stop thinking about what other “basilisks” there might be. She believed that, for “trying to save the world,” she would be “tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly AIs.”
This, she felt, was acceptable, because, “Evil gods must be fought … if this damns me then so be it.”
A technically gifted young software developer who grew up in Alaska, LaSota entrenched herself in “rationalist” discussion venues like LessWrong in the 2010s before establishing a small following of like minded comrades in the Bay Area. LaSota and her friends tried, bizarrely, to establish a sort of cooperative housing group for IT people interested in rationalism and anti-AI practices on sailboats docked in a marina, though this project fell apart after she sailed a tugboat from Alaska back to California, spent four months marooned aboard the ship, then abandoned it.
Then, in November of 2019, LaSota’s collective—who would later be referred to as Zizians, a name they never claimed for themselves—staged a demonstration at a Northern California campground meetup for members of three organizations devoted to minimizing the potential harm of machine intelligence. At first seeking to host talks at the event to confront leaders of the organizations about alleged capitulation to blackmail regarding accusations of sexual harassment against a former employee, after realizing that they had been banned from attending the meetup at all, LaSota and her coconspirator Gwen Danielson, along with Emma Borhanian and Alex Leatham, donned masks and robes and showed up anyway.
Police responded after receiving calls about the protestors blocking off the camp’s exits, as well as reports that one protestor may have been carrying a gun and another a hatchet, and arrested the four trans women. Thereafter, the women alleged that the police detained them for nearly a week, stripping them naked and psychologically torturing them for the duration. The situation would devolve into a series of court battles that were never properly resolved, and the Zizians’ next few years would be no less strange and horrible.
Ziz LaSota would fake her own death to escape prosecution, and Gwen Danielson may have done the same. Borhanian and Leatham wound up in California, where they attempted to murder a man for evicting them from his property; Borhanian was shot dead and Leatham remains on trial, though the man they assaulted (who is the only witness in the case) was murdered in January by another AI-obsessed university graduate, Maximilian Snyder, who was recently married to one of two people apprehended after a shootout with Border Patrol agents that left a US Air Force veteran dead. The shooter in question had ties to a Zizian who may have at one point suspected in the double homicide of her own parents.
To suggest that any of this tracks neatly would be absurd. This is a story about Silicon Valley obsessives who, through a combination of doomerism and self-imposed isolation, seem to have lost their minds. Or perhaps they were always unwell, and a series of arbitrary events led them down a very dark path. Indeed, at least two other people who came into close contact with LaSota and her worldview later took their own lives. It seems undeniable that Ziz LaSota has had a deleterious effect on many who come into contact with her, and questioning why that might be is a natural response.
Right-wing media, however, would much rather use the Zizians’ story as a cautionary tale about the evils of transgender people and… well, any other potential cultural war issue they can bring up, really.