Return of the Zizians
When I promised to write about "AI weirdness," this wasn't really what I had in mind.
This Substack kicked off in October 2022 with the series Extropia’s Children, which explored how modern AI is socially and culturally downstream of a tiny, obscure 1990s mailing list. Its second chapter, This Demon-Haunted World, was about the bizarre slew of cults, psychoses, and suicides accidentally spawned en route, and leads with the warning “This chapter goes to some very strange and dark places.”
Welp. As it turns out, we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. Since then—these last two weeks in particular—that story has grown darker and stranger yet, to include multiple murders across America. Yes, really. As probably the first (quasi-) journalist to have written about the group in question in some detail, I feel a certain duty to keep the tale up to date. If you don’t want to read about some of the more unhinged fringes of the human experience, I understand; but if you care to know more about the Zizians, read on.
Extropia’s Children was mostly an online oral history, and this too will be a quick overview of existing sources. Other summaries exist; good ones are here and here.
The Backstory
As previously described, the Zizians were one of several groups amid the Bay Area rationalism scene of the 2010s who exhibited cult-like behavior and/or psychotic divergence from consensus reality. In November 2019 they were arrested in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, while protesting “artificial intelligence, the Center for Applied Rationality, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.”
The Zizians are named after their leader Ziz, who is, at least according to a web site built to warn people about her, “particularly interested in AI risk researchers,” “seems to go out of her way to target transgender people” (Ziz is a trans woman herself), and “preaches a doctrine of radical high-tech veganism that promotes punishing your ideological enemies.” Ziz is also, remarkably, a hemispherist:
Ziz writes that each person has two cores made up of their left and right hemispheres. Each of these is considered a full person, and when Ziz says "person" she really means an animal's core.
As of the writing of Extropia’s Children, Ziz was thought to have contributed to the suicide of a woman known as Maia, and the Zizians were clearly, as I put it then, “deeply sad and completely batshit.” Even that was an understatement. Only a few months later they began to leave multiple murders and murder attempts in their wake.
The First Murders
In February 2023 one ‘SefaShapiro’ posted to Medium “A community alert about Ziz.” To tl;dr its tl;dr:
In August 2022 Ziz seems to have faked her own death in a boating accident. A close associate Gwen may have also faked their death in April 2022.
In November 2022, three associates of Ziz attacked their landlord in Vallejo, California. One stabbed him with a sword; he shot two of them, killing one; the survivors were arrested. Ziz and Gwen were seen by police at the scene, alive. (The landlord apparently “miraculously survived being stabbed multiple times, had a sword impaled through his chest, and ultimately lost his right eye.”)
The parents of another associate, Jamie Zajko, were murdered in their home in Pennsylvania on (most likely) the last day of 2022. It is thought plausible that Ziz was involved.
Ziz was taken into custody for obstructing justice, but in June 2023 her bail was lowered and she was released.
SefaShapiro goes on to mention “Some members of the group apparently spent time together in Orleans County, Vermont before the murders.” This is suddenly highly relevant, because—
January 2025
“A 21-year-old woman was arrested and charged on Friday after the shooting death on Monday of a U.S. Border Patrol agent near the Canadian border,” quoth The New York Times. The shooting happened on January 20. The shooter was one Teresa Youngblut, all of 21 years old, a University of Washington computer science student.
Her companion—killed by the Border Patrol in the resulting shootout—was (like me…) a University of Waterloo alum, and (not like me…) an International Math Olympiad gold medal winner and former Jane Street intern, impressive credentials of unusual intelligence. That said, their reported actions were bizarre and dumb: “skulking about smalltown Vermont dressed in black tactical gear” and openly carrying firearms (legal in Vermont, but suspicion-inducing) followed by fleeing their hotel shortly after police stopped them to inquire what they were up to.
What were they up to? Why did they open fire on the Border Patrol? We still have no idea. We do know that the FBI found “guns and ammunition, as well as an odd assortment of tactical and computer gear” in their car.
These deaths were quickly connected to the Zizians by none other than Jessica Taylor (who herself appears in two different sections of Extropia’s Children) on Twitter, and knew Youngblut’s deceased companion:
The Vermont prosecutor quickly made the same connection:
To quote The National Post quoting the prosecutor’s memo: “Both the defendant and the person who purchased the firearms in Vermont … are acquainted with and have been in frequent contact with an individual who was detained by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during that homicide investigation; that individual is also a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.”
To which you might think:
Who could that person possibly be?
Murders in faraway Vermont and Vallejo in the same week?
Yep. Curtis Lind, the Vallejo landlord almost murdered by the Zizians in November 2022, was stabbed to death on January 17th of this year, three days before the Border Patrol shooting. One week later, one Maximilian Snyder, who apparently studied computer science and philosophy at Oxford, was arrested in Redding for the crime. And guess what? “In November, Snyder appears to have taken out a marriage license in Washington state’s King County with Teresa Youngblut.”
You won’t find a clearer connection between two distant brutal homicides than that. Apparently Lind’s killing wasn’t simply revenge: court documents suggest he was “killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding.”
Where We’re At
As of January 29, much remains unknown:
where Ziz and Jamie Zajko are
how many Zizians there are, and where they are
what they were trying to do in Vermont,
what kind of testimony from Lind they were trying to forestall.
This is now getting a fair amount of mainstream media play … but few go back to where this all began, in the Bay Area’s rationalism / AI safety community in the 2010s. It’s admittedly a pretty tortuous history. As a friend of mine put it, “Man do I feel for the public defender.”
Regardless of what comes out in court, this already sounds like one of the most bizarre and bloody murder cults in California history, which is saying a lot. I find myself going all the way back to the Manson Family for a comparison. Will we look back and see the Zizians as the thin edge of a wedge of AI madness? I hope not, and I genuinely don’t think so … but I confess I can’t rule it out entirely.