The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians
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Summary
In August 2022, a tipsy 20-year-old ploughing aZRowing boat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta struck and killed a racing shell containing two Stanford University students, mutilated a third student’s foot, and shot a fourth in the face, all while livestreaming.
The boat’s driver, Gwen Danielson, and its passenger, Ziz McKay LaSota, turned out to be members of a shadowy, paranoid group of transhumanists calling themselves the Zizian Collective, named after an almond-shaped alien species they believed to be real.
The collective had ties to the Singularity Summit, a conference for discussing AI; the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which works toward safe AI; and other grouped concerned about super intelligent machines.
The shooting occurred roughly two months after the group’s founder, LaSota, had been jailed for allegedly trying to murder a Marin County deputy sheriff.
LaSota and Danielson then went on the run, ending up in Vermont, where LaSota was allegedly shot by the US Border Patrol trying to cross into Canada.
