Dreaming

My brief thoughts on the Zizians

A fascinating phenomenon of our times is the Shadows that lurk in the popular media, like dreams that are not easily identified or understood. A frustration born of a mixture of expectation and disappointment is felt across the country as if carried by the winds. To be human is to be attracted to methods dealing with coping mechanisms caused by everyday life. The addition of feeling unworthy in a world where the power structure tells you that you are not necessary and can be considered a threat to a way of life is not a pleasant tiptoe through the tulips. In the murky waters of the Media, I discovered the presence of the Zizians.

The Zizians are a group from the Bay Area of California with a common interest in radical veganism and anarchist theory. They all have backgrounds in computer science and identify themselves as transgender or non-binary. The group or gang is led by Jack "Ziz" LaSota, who identifies as a transgender woman and has been charged with incidents that led to six deaths. She may also have faked her death, but oddly enough, although LaSota has written manifestos/essays on her blog, there is currently no trace of her writings online. She may have pulled them down, or the police or server removed the manifestos. I even asked ChatGPT if her work was censored, but she didn’t give me a clear answer. However, Chat did report back to me that, to quote: Please note that accessing such content may involve engaging with material that is controversial and potentially distressing.

It is also interesting to note that, as of this writing, the case against this group and its leader regarding online information is somewhat vague. At this point, I find this interesting about the Zizians: their vagueness is not due to them but rather to how the press covers them. Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is another figure of mystery. All the suspects are intelligent and well-educated in their fields of training and interest. Still, information about their work seems to leak slowly in the mainstream media. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published Mangione’s manifesto, but generally, the public yawned and turned over to sleep some more.

My interest in Luigi and the Zizians is more in their unconventional thinking. To be clear, I’m not even sure how political the Ziaians are in their practices, which seem to include perhaps murder. I have always been enthralled with the figure of the fictional character Fantomas. Evil for the sake of evil, but it seems to have a political aspect since the stories took place before and during World War I in Paris. Fantomas is interested in chaos and seems more of a spirit than a human. It’s a bad mood in a human’s body.

The thought of a group of computer scientists who are also gender-free or transexual has a romantic echo attached to the imagery that they produce. They could have been imagined by Jean-Luc Godard or the authors Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (Fantomas). The Surrealists played with the thought of violence within society, not announced, but almost as a living dream. The thing is, we have a Chaos-making machine in the White House, so any opposing actions have to be irrational to be effective because logic and dead institutions such as a Political Party are acts of nostalgia that will not exist anymore. Whatever form it takes, or actions taken by figures like Luigi or The Zizians, will make sense in a world that has gone mad, and they only yawned. Some can’t sleep or afford to be asleep. So, the ongoing narrative will be like a serialized story published in a newspaper (or website).

One can read an article from The Times here.