A fatal confrontation on the Vermont border has exposed how Silicon Valley’s elitist tech immorality can spiral rapidly into real-world harms to society. This isn’t about innovation – national security experts must acknowledge groups exploiting technological complexity mask straightforward domestic terrorism. The same people who brought you FTX and Musk’s teenage “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) – which purged federal experts while breaching and leaking government systems in a Khmer Rouge-style destruction of expertise are spawning predictable outcomes: from massive financial fraud and incompetent breaches of federal systems to gun-toting assassins, all are powered by the same bogus magical technology thinking.
What began in high wealth individual rationalist circles – where tech elites debated ethics, consciousness, and societal redesign between Burning Man trips – allegedly has led to at least seven dead across three states at the hands of radicalized militant technologists. This follows a pattern in history where domain shifts in technology repeatedly bring with them the threat of trojan horses with destructive aims masquerading as a gift of progress.
Maximilian. Who names their child Maximilian? Elites of the elites.
Snyder and Youngblut both attended Lakeside School, a private high school in Seattle. Snyder studied computer science at the University of Oxford, according to his LinkedIn profile, and in 2023 won $11,000 in an artificial intelligence research competition. Youngblut described herself on social media as a computer science student at the University of Washington.
They formed a group called the Zizians out of the same extremist anti-government soup that produced today’s techno-utopian billionaires. Like Elon Musk’s “DOGEan” teenagers destroying federal expertise in the false name of “efficiency” while breaching secure systems, or his dire warnings about “woke” while he soaks up government handouts, or Peter Thiel’s quest for a sprawling intelligence empire to become a secretive techno-king, they questioned society’s basic moral frameworks and why they should abide by any laws. But where the cunning dishonestly that laundered apartheid wealth enabled South African-born tech leaders to pivot such thoughts into destabilizing and capturing the entire American state, these Zizians chose instead a far more obvious and localized violent path.
[Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who met LaSota both in person and online through the rationalist community] said Ziz adherents use the rationalist ideology as a reason to commit violence. “Stuff like, thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” she said.
Their leader, Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota, openly explored what would happen if society were stripped of conventional morality. The group attracted high performing accomplished members – Big Tech engineers, Oxford-educated data scientists, competition-winning mathematicians. They first attempted to escape society via a “Rationalist Fleet”, an ill-fated tugboat scheme reminiscent of many earlier Silicon Valley attempts at autonomous zones.
Elon Musk called his fantasy world “Mars Technocracy” (to invalidate laws).
Peter Thiel called his fantasy world seasteading (to invalidate laws).
The Zizian inexperience and incompetence combined with an ill-conceived autonomous society-on-a-boat plan sank the whole thing, literally. Unlike Musk and Thiel however, they lacked an “invisible” empire that shared a particular vision of “investment” curated through growing up in apartheid South Africa. In other words, the Zizian’s have been disadvantaged in their domestic terrorism approach to unraveling the American state, as minor operators lacking Musk and Thiel’s heavy use of back-room deals for a technology-driven race war.
When the laws of physics forced a Zizian setback it only accelerated the group’s descent into more anti-law madness (e.g. how Elon Musk reframes his increasingly obvious failures at Tesla and SpaceX into investment “opportunities” for even more and larger “rapid disassembly” leading to death). Their protests against rationalist communities turned into extremist angry outbursts and confrontations (e.g. how Elon Musk throws angry Nazi salutes and angrily campaigns for AfD – Nazi party – to take control over Germany). Zizian confrontations led to individual acts of sloppy self-incriminating violence. A landlord serving an eviction for unpaid rent ended in a sword fight, a gun fight and then assassination. An elderly Pennsylvania couple was assassinated. A military veteran serving as a Border Patrol agent doing routine paperwork died in an abrupt fire-fight.
During a records check, the unidentified female passenger was removed from the vehicle for further questioning, broke free, and began shooting at the agents, the incident report shows. After the female suspect was hit by return fire, Bauckholt emerged from the vehicle and also began firing on the agents. He sustained gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead.
This Vermont tragedy at the border has been generating the most news of all because the German “wiz” mathematician Ophelia Bauckholt and Teresa Youngblut had wrapped cellphones in foil while wearing tactical gear garnished by open carry guns. It exemplifies how child-like fascination with technical sophistication as a form of privileged power feeds into anti-government technologist madness.
Authorities who searched the car found a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, respirators and ammunition, the FBI said. They also found two-way radios and used shooting range targets.
The fetish of fast in guns, encryption protocols and cryptocurrency operations reflected the mindset as DOGEans who breached federal systems, and the billion-dollar crypto frauds, as the same pseudo-super-society-hacker fantasy expressed through different tools. Their sloppy tradecraft and tactical mistakes repeatedly reveal what happens when technological magical thinking meets physical reality.
The pattern is an inevitable outcome of Silicon Valley’s tendency to view society as a system to be hacked and disabled – from DOGEans purging government expertise like digital Khmer Rouge to Zizians taking up arms – whether through market manipulation or direct violence. When young privilege-driven technical minds untether from conventional morality, the results can be deadly. The same drive to disrupt and rebuild, which creates billion-dollar frauds who capture federal politicians to destroy federal aid, also can turn into targeted murder and stoke local chaos.
Remember the Rajneeshees? They at least needed a physical compound. These new tech cult killers are more dangerous – they’re nomadic, using technology as their virtual compound, armed with both Python and pistols, treating America like their personal hackathon project gone catastrophically wrong. The same mindset that leads some to build racist digital empires to destroy lives at the national-level leads others to pull physical triggers in a pointless assassination.
Zizian investigations at the local level continue across jurisdictions, while DOGE’s teenage destructive force gets away with systematically dismantling federal expertise. Four Zizian group members sit in custody on murder charges. Three remain at large, including LaSota. The broader question remains: how many other groups are following similar philosophical paths toward anti-government violence?
The real horror isn’t just the body count – it’s how this fits a pattern. From DOGE’s teenage purge of government expertise to cryptocurrency schemes that vaporize retirement savings, Silicon Valley’s rationalist communities keep “exploring how to rebuild society’s ethical frameworks.” Most channel these ideas into lossy startups and wacky manifestos that drain investors. But as the Zizian bloodshed shows, some experiments in moral philosophy end not just in huge stock fraud but in body counts.
Next time your local teenage tech billionaire talks about redesigning society’s moral framework, remember: whether through market manipulation or direct violence, it’s really about insecure kids of privilege using technology as their magical shield against accountability, leading inevitably to violence against society – sometimes financial, sometimes physical, always destructive terrorism.
Technological innovations can easily mask dual purposes: the printing press enabled both enlightenment and racist propaganda, gunpowder birthed both festive fireworks and modern warfare, and machine guns sold as tools of colonial control using automation became instruments of mass trench death in WWI and a genocidal Holocaust. What’s marketed as progress often conceals potential for accelerated destruction where left unchecked.
Related: OpenAI CEO Altman Announces End of Civil Society in Stargate AI Plan
