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| -Great Cultural Revolution | |||
| Book: How Silicon Valley's AI tech culture gave birth to a trans death cult-Andy Ngo | |||
| 2026-10-12 | |||
In January 2016, Jack LaSota, a 23-year-old aspiring tech entrepreneur from Alaska, headed to Silicon Valley with big dreams. Before that, he was an engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researching space weather events. But his passions veered elsewhere: video-game design, rationalism and effective altruism. One of his creations was titled Dystheism, ancient Greek for “bad god.” It was a puzzle game where players controlled the souls of dead people represented by humanoid, single-horned, faceless creatures with crackled, black-burned flesh. Players navigated lost souls through block-puzzle landscapes of the afterlife. His pitch: “This game will push your brain to the breaking point, just like your character’s soul.” The imagery would later feel like foreshadowing. Not long after Jack had begun coding Dystheism, his outward appearance began to change. He started wearing a long, hooded black cloak around campus. He would call it a “Sith” robe — the garb of the dark-side warriors in the Star Wars universe — but with the hood pulled forward, he resembled something more ominous. Jack spent most of 2015 refining the game and applying for jobs in the Bay Area. His blog, Sinceriously, documented this period. He used an image of a purple-tinted, fantasy-style female humanoid spirit as his avatar. “I moved to the Bay Area for proximity to the tech industry which I considered sort of my destiny,” he wrote. He believed he could “best contribute to saving the world” by donating his income to various causes. In a 2022 court declaration, he elaborated, “All the smartest people I knew said there was a global emergency in the neglect of ethics and even care [for] the future by AI researchers.” But life in the Bay Area proved difficult and demoralizing for Jack. He bounced between jobs, being fired or denied contract renewals. It was during this period that LaSota began to absorb the ideas that have become popular among young tech workers today — beliefs he would warp into his murderous cult. Jack adopted the alias Ziz, drawn from the fantasy web serial by John McCrae called Worm. He viewed himself as a savior, writing that he was “willing to go to Hell to save everyone else.” But in the story, Ziz is a winged female monster that poses as benevolent while plotting humanity’s destruction. The abomination uses mass psychological manipulation to turn people homicidal or into walking time bombs who are later destructive. RATIONALISM AND EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM With Jack’s life unraveling, he sought validation in Bay Area rationalist meetups — gatherings of high-IQ tech professionals, many on the autism spectrum, obsessed with abstract questions about artificial intelligence and humanity’s future. Rationalism — loosely defined as the belief that reason, probability, and evidence can be applied to understand the world and optimize decision-making — functions in Silicon Valley like a secular megachurch, complete with conferences, workshops, social gatherings, internal debates, and even doomsday narratives. Outsiders struggled to grasp it; insiders believed they were solving humanity’s most urgent problems. Many young rationalists became involved in the movement through the forum and blog LessWrong, founded in 2009 by rationalist philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky. By 2022, the forum had grown to thousands of members. They called themselves the “rat community.” Yudkowsky, born in 1979, is widely regarded as one of the godfathers of contemporary rationalism. Raised in Chicago in an Orthodox Jewish family, he dropped out before starting high school and educated himself. His writings on epistemology, artificial intelligence safety (often called “AI alignment”), and transhumanism are so influential that critics sometimes describe his following as cultlike or quasi-religious. To devotees — occasionally characterized as groupies — he is known simply as “Yud.” The Bay Area’s rationalist community was disproportionately composed of STEM brainiacs — professors, engineers, start-up founders. They debated AI and how to save humanity from self-destruction, toggling in the span of a few sentences between Bayesianism, probability theory, timeless decision theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, utilitarianism, and even Harry Potter fan fiction.
LessWrong, MIRI, CFAR formed the intellectual infrastructure of the Bay Area rationalist movement. Community hubs, such as Berkeley REACH (Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub), connected members in real life. Those online networks attracted gifted, hyperfocused young people. Yet even within this experimental, insular, and competitive environment, Ziz stood apart. For Ziz, discussion was not enough. Everyone had to be vegan and reject eating or harming all animals; otherwise you were “evil”. Transgender or non-binary people were more advanced and more likely to be part of the vanguard, he believed. Rationalists had to act now to shape AI before the singularity, otherwise the world would be destroyed. His writings eventually attracted two dozen or so followers across the country — brilliant, mostly transgender, many autistic — all of whom rejected mainstream rationalism in favor of their own radical ideology. While rationalism and effective altruism often transcended traditional politics — neither clearly left nor right and frequently attracting the apolitical or libertarian — the Zizians found such neutrality intolerable. Instead, they drew from the language of social justice, anarchist thought, and an increasingly simmering desire for vengeance. In time, the cult would be linked to eight deaths, including a landlord they exploited, the parents of one of the members, and a US Border Patrol agent who got in their way. In August, Maryland’s felony case against three members, including leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota, was suddenly suspended indefinitely for reasons that remain unclear. Ziz, however, was transferred to federal custody in Philadelphia to await a still-unscheduled trial over some of the damage wrought by the cult. His twisted ideology lives on — not only among members who remain free, but among those who continue to be radicalized by his writings online.
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