Meet Josiah Zayner, America’s Most Censored Person – by Matt Taibbi – TK News by Matt Taibbi
Whether it s Zayner gulping down a massive antibiotic cocktail in a WU-TANG FOREVER t-shirt, or repeatedly grimacing as he swallows home-crafted feces capsules in a hotel room, the short documentary is a parade of scenes make your eyeballs pop out in shock and amazement, cartoon-style. Zayner, by any measure, is an extraordinarily interesting character. He has a mind almost perfectly engineered against obedience: brilliant, fearless, and not accepting every assumption but checking the validity of each. He alternately bristles at or ignores judgment, seeming to draw inspiration from it in either case. At the end of Gut Hack, we see him standing on a subway platform, shaking his head as he listens to the two Verge journalists denounce him. We hear their audio:
Not putting your life in danger unnecessarily is pretty basic, they complain, adding that his experiment was not even a blip in the scientific radar.
There s a fine line, Zayner later sighs to the Times, between being crazy and knowledgeable. He goes on to talk about growing up poor, and different, in the Midwest. When you grow up on a farm, you have all this freedom, he says. We don t have any neighbors or anyone to interact with, so we re used to just doing what we want. And when you get to this environment were people don t do that, you re immediately pegged as, you know, a weirdo.
Some weeks after, he s shown feeling better, but he wants more than a placebo result. The film ends with him receiving the results of genetic sequencing tests that appear to show his gut hack experiment worked. He bursts into tears. The Times reporter asks, Do you feel vindicated?
He seems surprised by the question. No, he says, it s not about that. It s one of those things, he says, where you re so moved and impressed by how science works.
Zayner went on to claim his battle with irritable bowel syndrome had been won, only to be replaced by a new malady. My physical signs of IBS were gone, he said recently. But so was my privacy. This is when the deplatforming began.
This Zayner fellow sounds dangerous. Doing science on his own? Trying to know unauthorized things? Very dangerous. He should be cancelled.