#2: Why I could have been a Zizian

In today's newsletter, I want to fulfil a promise. Last month I went on stage at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts to discuss the bizarre and tragic saga of the 'Zizians' with David Farrier, host of the Flightless Bird podcast. It was a lovely evening, and worth listening to.

The Zizians are hard to explain. They way I gloss it in my reporting is that they're a disunited group of radical vegans who split off from the San Francisco Bay Area's cultish ‘rationalist’ subculture, who are now facing various criminal charges from trespassing to homicide. There’s still a lot we don’t know, and a wide range of possible truths between “totally a murder cult” and “actually victims of a witch hunt”.

When I advertised the show on Bluesky, I said I'd "explain why in a parallel universe I might have been a Zizian". On the night, though, we didn't quite get to that. So today, for the benefit of both my readers and the FBI agent assigned to monitor me (hey girl!), I'd like to explore that alternate universe.

But first: the headlines.

Analysis: What did Elon Musk really achieve at DOGE?

After 128 days, Elon Musk says he’s leaving government. In my analysis for The Independent, I argue that he failed dramatically to cut federal spending — but succeeded in taking a chainsaw to the US political system.

Live in San Francisco: Smart vibrators, Zizians, and The Room 

[Or see here for non-Apple links]

Flightless Bird is a wonderful podcast, especially if (like me) you’re an outsider trying to make sense of these topsy-turvy United States. I think I fell over myself a bit trying to stress the uncertainty and ambiguity of it all, and probably said the word “unclear” about a thousand times. Still, hopefully I got some interesting points across (and apparently I was quite funny). I don’t think they recorded the part where I hurled a T-shirt into the audience too hard, causing my bracelet to come apart and scatter improvised projectiles all over the audience, but that sure is a thing that happened. Thank you to the many attendees who kindly found me afterwards to hand in lost beads!

Anyway, what exactly do I mean when I say I could have been a Zizian?

Before my girlboss galpal in the San Francisco Field Office gets too excited, I don't mean that I harbour any desire to murder people or get into gunfights with federal agents, as some 'Zizians' are alleged to have done. My friends would readily testify that I am a pretty grounded and even-keeled person, with modest and conventional dreams. Or at least that’s what they’ll say if they know what’s good for ‘em.

What I mean is that unlike many reporters, and many readers, I don't feel lost in the world of the Zizians. They don’t feel like aliens to me. I don't find their arguments unintelligible, or their beliefs incomprehensible. They’re weird, sure, but so am I, and it doesn't take a huge leap to see how it could all make perfect sense if I just twisted the initial premises like so. Again and again in the course of my reporting I have been struck by a dizzying sense of recognition, even kinship, which only makes the whole affair even sadder.

I think this is basically down to three factors. The first is that, like apparently most of the people involved in this mess, I am trans and autistic — and proudly so. Although conservative media outlets have focused largely on the former (complete with gleeful misgendering), I actually feel the latter is more crucial to understanding what happened.

Throughout this story there are many arguments and decisions that only make sense to me through an autistic lens. The ardent, uncompromising sense of justice. The galaxy-brained moral calculations. The willingness to do a thing simply because it's logically correct, and to follow that logic to its end whatever the inconvenience. The trauma and the longing. I recognise all this, because I've lived it.

The second factor is rationalism. As I've alluded to before, it would probably be accurate to call myself a lapsed rationalist. I've never been part of any rationalist communities, and I have no ideological commitment to rationalism as a project. Still, I’d be lying if I said my worldview wasn’t shaped by its ideas, and I’m better than the average journalist at decoding its distinctive jargon. (At some point I’m sure I’ll write a full post about this.)

In particular, I spent most of my teenage years utterly enthralled with the rationalist-entangled memeplex known as Singularitarianism. Superhuman AIs transforming the world! Human consciousness uploaded into machines, copied and modified and downloaded into new bodies! Complete plasticity of thought, flesh, and reality itself! It's not hard to see why a nerdy trans kid who lived on the internet would be drawn to these ideas. With hindsight, I might have been richer and more influential if I'd stayed obsessed.

So there is absolutely a world in which my yearning for belonging, for truth, for a people to call my own found purchase there instead of elsewhere, and I ended up living in a Berkeley group house with a bunch of AI engineers. In time, perhaps I too would have crashed out — or been exiled.

The third factor is what often happens when you combine autism and rationalism (assuming, in fact, that these are separable). There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes with this territory: an obsessive marble run down endlessly looping tracks of nth-order rumination as you struggle and strain to make sense of this chaotic world, and of your own mind.

Personally, I burned out on rationalism when I started transitioning and saw these thoughts for what they were. Or anyway what they were to me; I can't speak for others. In truth they were mostly displacement activity, a desperate frenzied scramble to patch over the yawning hole where my intrinsic sense of self-worth should have been. Estrogen fixed that, allowing me to finally touch grass and connect more authentically with my basic desires and values.

Why did my life take such a different path? What, if anything, separates me from Ziz or her friends? That would be a whole other essay, requiring a level of knowledge about their lives that no journalist currently has. Maybe it would also require a level of presumption unbecoming of the kind of journalist I aspire to be. There but for the grace of the Goddess, right?

Thanks for reading! As always, you can find me on Bluesky here, on X here, and read my recent stories for The Independent here.