Zizian, transgender, Google & Debian open source extremist cult phenomena
February 19, 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
The Zizian cult has gained significant media attention this week. Media reports tell us that they are computer scientists, some may have been affiliated with Google and they are transgender.
So often we see open source communities making false statements about people for political reasons. Here we have an example of some people who are accused of some very serious crimes and we don't see any statement from Debian or any other group explaining the extent to which these people have participated in our events and online collaboration.
Wikipedia has a page about the killing of border patrol officer David Maland and the following comment is notable:
The Zizians are named after their founder, Jack Amadeus "Ziz" LaSota, who targeted "smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated" for recruitment.
In fact, the same thing could be said about just about every open source organization who is competing to recruit transgender people. In the case of the Zizian cult, transgender people were recruited into some activities that are easily recognized as criminal.
In open source groups, there is a push-pull relationship with the transgender community. These people are socially isolated, they are often working in remote jobs and they are often home at night. They rarely have responsibilities for family or children. This gives them the ability to spend seven nights a week in online chat rooms and social media. This is where the push-pull relationship arises: they offer their time for free but they quickly demand the powers to be moderators and censors of the channels where they participate. Full time developers rarely have time for chores like this and they are often handing over power to people who politicize the roles of mailing list moderation.
An example of this is the exploitation of Ariadne Conill who is known for working on Alpine Linux. It looks like somebody gave Ariadne a diversity ticket to DebConf19 in Brazil and she immediately started using social media to attack my family. I never met Ariadne and I never had any involvement in her projects. It looks like she was exploited to spread defamation in exchange for some free conference tickets. The tactical use of transgender people to spread defamation in exchange for travel benefits is a form of social engineering attack on the community. Dr Norbert Preining and his family were attacked in similar circumstances. We were told that the Debian Account Managers and the Debian "Anti-Harassment" Team had independently concluded he needed a punishment. It was subsequently revealed that some of the people in those teams are LGBT and they are romantically involved with each other. Therefore, these teams don't make objective decisions.
The public at large continue to be amazed at the way that cults like this form. In fact, cults are far more common than we think. They only get significant public attention when serious crimes are involved. Nonetheless, I feel one of the most relevant examples for open source communities is the Heaven's Gate cult from the 1990s.
What is special about Heaven's Gate is that they all decided to be castrated/sterilized/neutered. This is a lot like open source groups agreeing to be slaves to a Code of Conduct. I previously wrote a blog about how some people in Debian consented to be castrated with a code of conduct while the vast majority did not consent to this.
The other key thing about Heaven's Gate is that they all picked a special day for suicide. We saw the same phenomena when another Debian Developer chose to write his suicide note the night before Debian Day. It is not clear if that was the beginning of the Debian suicide cluster or if it was a symptom of just how bad things had already become. █
How can we recognize a cult?
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.