DYSTOPIAN DIGITAL TERROR
October 22, 2025
The woman managing United Airlines gate D3 greets each passenger with, “Please stand here and face the camera”. I let her know I don’t do facial recognition. “Maggie, is this mandatory yet?” She responds “I don’t think so”. So I hand the attendant my boarding pass and head down the jetway towards my seat.
As I was driving to the airport I get a call from my former wife. She asks me to call her back when I am settled. It’s urgent she explains. I call her back. “I was just let go without warning. My job was replaced by AI.” No severance pay. The Social Security offices were closed due to the government shutdown and she can’t log on to essential websites because of the disruption in the Amazon Cloud Services. She sounds desperate. I promised to help. My heart is broken.
The shutdown could also impact food stamps. “SNAP benefits for November won’t be issued if the federal government shutdown continues past Oct. 27”, warned the Texas’ Health and Human Services Department. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) stated that it will not have enough federal funds to issue all of November’s SNAP benefits if the government shutdown lasts into the month. Separately from the government shutdown, new rules under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will also start in November, which means stricter work requirements will apply for many SNAP recipients.
We are living in a time of cruelty when Fox and Friends Brian Kilmeade could comfortably respond to Lawrence Jones when he says “They have given billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population. Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” Kilmeade said. “Just kill ‘em.”
Santa Cruz County’s largest homeless services provider, Housing Matters, is expected to close its Day Services program, which provides showers, bathrooms, water and a welcome area for homeless people at its Coral Street campus. The cuts to services also come as Housing Matters has conducted weekly sweeps of Coral Street in front of the shelter for more than a year.
The campaign to dehumanize those made homeless is nationwide bipartisan. Just a bunch of mentally ill drug addicts that don’t deserve our compassion. California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order in July 2024, to direct state agencies on how to remove homeless encampments.
A year later the Trump administration issued Executive Order 14321, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” It states “ Purpose and Policy. Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.” It also continues to dehumanize those without housing saying “The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes.”
These policies may be an attempt to respond to an expected increase in homelessness due in part to the rapid replacement of workers by AI and other digital systems.
My former wife was one of over 209,000 employees who were laid off and replaced by AI across 1,319 companies so far in 2025 (and that’s just the layoffs that meet state reporting rules). On average, around 1.6 million people are laid off each month in the U.S., translating to an estimated 19.2 million annually. In August 2025, 85,979 jobs vanished, many being replaced by AI, a 140% surge compared to the same month last year.
The global rush to force Biometric digital ID on their citizens is already having catastrophic economic impact and could increase the number of people becoming homeless. Each country has its own unique policies they believe their populations might be willing to comply with.
In Ukraine the US State Department introduced the Diia app in 2020 where all your government documents including digital ID is stored. The Diia app has a feature that allows you to turn in Russian speaking people for prosecution.
Billionaire Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the CIA initiated Palantir, writes on September 11, 2025, “A camping ban without enforcement is a dead letter. Residents should have an app to report encampments or street crime in real time. If city police fail to respond within hours, state authorities should step in, and if the problem persists after 24 hours, clear it themselves.”
Using this app, citizens could submit a photo of the problem, then confirm inaction by uploading another photo the next day.
This digital craze may dramatically increase the number of people forced in to homelessness who become the target of Lonsdale’s brilliant “solution”.
As of September 1, 2025, banks across Vietnam were closing accounts deemed inactive or non-compliant with new biometric rules. Authorities estimate that more than 86 million accounts out of roughly 200 million are at risk if users fail to update their identity verification.
The United Kingdom’s new digital ID program claims it will help combat illegals working, while making it easier for the vast majority of people to use vital government services. Digital ID will be mandatory for Right to Work checks by the end of the Parliament. One can imagine how many people will find themselves homeless as a result.
The Bank of Russia developed the digital biometric identification system with the implementation of the Guidelines for Financial Technology Development for 2018-2020. The Bank of Russia website claims, “The creation and development of the digital biometric identification platform means that financial services can be digitalized, financial inclusion can be increased, making financial services accessible for, among others, disabled, elderly and physically challenged consumers, and that competition in the financial market can be raised.”
Mexico officially introduced a digital identification system by signing a law that turned the previously optional biometric-based citizen code into a mandatory document for all citizens. The mandatory CURP will contain personal and biometric information, including a photograph and a QR code containing biometric fingerprint and iris data. The identifier is expected to be introduced gradually to all Mexicans by February 2026. So far the Mexicans I have spoken with believe it will be difficult to get people to cooperate.
The crypto crash in October 2025 could be a sign of things to come. Banking on digital currency could leave hundreds of millions of people without access to their money just because of technical failures.
The Binance-linked token BNB tumbled as much as 11% on Friday, October 10th. The world’s largest crypto exchange was cited by analysts as a key driver of the record crash on Oct. 10 and 11 as users encountered technical glitches and price discrepancies.
Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn says “The October 10th sell-off began with high leverage slamming into thin order books, then worsened as exchange auto-deleveraging capped some market-maker shorts and thinned liquidity at the worst point. He cites roughly $19 billion of liquidations as bitcoin slid from an Oct. 6 all-time high near $126,300 to an intraday low around $107,000, with ether falling from about $4,800 to roughly $3,500 before markets steadied into the weekend.”
A digital panopticon prison-state is rapidly being forced on us. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison told stockholders on September 24, 2024, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts. “We’re going to have supervision,” he continued. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”
To make this frightening potential possible, massive AI data farms are being constructed all across the world. The number of hyperscale data centers, which house a large portion of AI capacity, increased to 1,136 globally in the last year. Companies are expected to spend $375 billion on data centers globally this year and $500 billion in 2026, according to the investment bank UBS.
The cost of electricity for households is increasing in part because of the need to power AI data centers. CNBC reports, “Billions of dollars of investment and customers’ electric bills are at stake”. CNBC reporter Spencer Kimball adds “The AI companies are rolling out ambitious plans to build server farms that in some cases would consume as much electricity as entire cities.”
Visual Capitalist reports that AI data farms use 7.4 percent of the state’s power and in Oregon it’s already up to 11.4 percent. Data centers in Ireland consume more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity.
Goldman Sachs reports, “Securing the power to operate these new data centers is even tougher, especially with AI data centers housing tens of thousands of energy-intensive GPUs in dense clusters. By 2030, data center power demand is expected to surge +160%*** relative to 2023 levels—and after a decade of flat demand growth, the current grid was not designed for this future.”
To meet the needs of the AI surveillance state nuclear power stations are being proposed and closed stations like Three Mile Island that had a meltdown on March 28, 1979, are going back online. Trade organizations like Central Coast Community Energy are pushing for the construction of new Lithium Battery Storage Sites while also providing lithium batteries to place on our homes.
These AI data centers are also a strain on water needs to cool the processors. For example Google, which operates Oregon data centers at The Dalles, a city of 16,000 people not far from the Morrow County center, resisted disclosing its water use, paying $100,000 for the city’s lawsuit against The Oregonian, a Portland newspaper that had filed a public records request for the data. When the suit was dropped, Google’s water-use totals were public: 355.1 million gallons, a quarter of the city’s annual water use in 2021.
While trillions of dollars are being invested in this surveillance and war-fighting industry their systems can crash. Even if you comply with the biometric ID programs, access to your banking or other essential services can vanish.
On October 20, 2025, Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS struggled to recover from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world’s most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Online banking, crypto, transportation and other businesses went dark across the globe. AWS CEO Matt Garman brags that 70% of their code is written by AI.
I support both a mass movement of noncooperation with this tyrannical dystopia and the formation of communities that live outside this control grid.This draconian system thankfully may collapse under its own contradictions. This sure is a time to start to rely on mutual aid groups on the fringes of society like Food Not Bombs. This may end up being our only hope at survival.
Food Not Bombs
PO Box 422 – Santa Cruz CA 95061 USA – https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
POWER HUNGRY
January 23, 2025
By Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry
There is a growing realization that the left right divide is mostly a fiction and that we all share the same struggles of paying our bills and keeping our families safe. We have never needed unity more than we do today.
One suggestion that this is true is the response to the assassination of United Health CEO Brian Thompson. People across the political spectrum are starting to see the billionaire vulture class as our common enemy. The response in the comments on Ben Shapiro’s podcast in support of Luigi was epic. Class war is replacing the culture wars as it gets more difficult to survive realizing that we have more in common with one another than what is claimed by politicians and media.
The TikTok ban was another sign that the human spirit cannot be crushed so easily. Americans on both the so called left and right turned to RedNote as the days ticked towards the TikTok ban. Popular TikTok personalities invited their followers to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu with #RedNote racing across the American social media.
As the day of the January 19th ban grew closer people started to post their RedNote content on X and other platforms. Americans realizing that they had been lied to about China as the Chinese RedNote members welcomed the #TikTokRefugees.
I have been inspired by the posts. The app has an instant translation feature that makes it easy for people across the Pacific to talk. Chinese people express shock that Americans are charged for ambulance trips to the hospital. Americans and Chinese are showing one another the contents of their refrigerators and comparing prices. Chinese members expressed shock that the homeless crisis was not Communist Party propaganda. One gruff MAGA hat wearing fellow was almost in tears at what he had experienced on the platform in just a couple of days. He had been lied to about China.
If there is one person that has the pulse of public opinion it is billionaire CIA contractor Peter Thiel the man behind VP Vance. He owns what he claims is the world’s most powerful AI surveillance data company Palantir. He is worried for the survival of his economic class.
Thiel appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” where the host asked him, “to those who think this shooter is a hero because he did it, because he said this healthcare executive is presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them coverage. What would you say to them?”
After being speechless for nearly 20 seconds, Thiel offered up a halting answer, telling Morgan, “It’s, I don’t know what, what to say? I, I think I still think you have, you should try to make an argument. And I, I think this is, this is you should, you know, there may be things wrong with our health care system, but you have, you have to make an argument, and you have to try to find a way to convince people and and change, change it by by that, and this is, you know, this is not going to work.”
“I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, I mean, all sorts of things I, I could say about it, but I don’t, I don’t think, and I again, I think, you know,” he added.
On May 9, 2024 Palantir CEO Alex Karp at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington D.C. expressed fear that the protests for Gaza meant that they were losing control. “We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show…If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.” They know the pitch forks are coming if we can see our fellow working class Americans as allies rather than fall for the false divisions of Democrats and Republicans.
The TikTok ban not only also demonstrates the possibility of class unity but it reveals what could be a central feature of our future. The CIA founded company Oracle switched off TikTok after the US Supreme Court ruled its elimination was not a violation of the Constitution only to turn it back on less than 24 hours later. When you logged back on millions of Americans were greeted by this message. “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.” It wasn’t long before people started to discover that you can’t post “Free Palestine”on the new TikTok.
On January 21, 2025 Trump, flanked by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Japanese CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son, announced the $500 billion AI total surveillance Project Stargate. “I’m gonna help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built. So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want.” Trump trumpeted.
And the outrage by Trump supporters at Larry Ellison’s glorification on the individual mRNA cancer vaccines made possible by AI was instantaneous on social media. Many in the MAGA crowd were already posting anger at all of his Neocon appointments, the prominence of billionaires like Elon Musk on his team and disappointment at Trumps support of the immigrant H-1B visa program.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said to investors in 2024. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
But what’s maybe even more important than the ability to implement Biometric Digital ID, programmable digital currency and total surveillance is warfare. Biden’s Jake Sullivan told Axios, “Regardless of what was said in public, every background conversation we had with President Biden’s high command came back to China. Yes, they had concerns about the ethics, misinformation and job loss of AI. They talked about that. But they were unusually blunt in private: Every move, every risk was calculated to keep China from beating us to the AI punch. Nothing else matters, they basically said.” AI targeting in Gaza, and autonomous swarm drone warfare is already being used on the battle field.
The Moss Landing Lithium-ion battery fire on January 16, 2025 provides a number of lessons that may bridge the artificially magnified left right divide. It is turning out that the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals may not be so green as the toxic gasses and heavy metals raining down across “America’s Salad Bowl”, farm land that provides 70% of our country’s vegetables.
This mental struggle is apparent in the public statements of Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church who both supports the Green Agenda but wants the battery storage facility to be safe, saying to the media the morning after the fire started, “This is a Three Mile Island event for this industry” We really don’t know much about this technology.”
“There are a lot of really powerful forces in this state and in this country that want to see these batteries in place and going out here… and we don’t really matter,” Church told a public meeting at Prunedale Grange 388 on January 20th. The State of California adopted legislation on June 30, 2022, that allows state authorities to bypass local laws in permitting large-scale renewable energy projects.
The case of OpenAI whistleblower 26 year old Suchir Balaji found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024, suggested Supervisor Church may be correct about what the community is up against. Suchir Balaji worked on the ChatGBT program and quit after Sam Altman turned OpenAI from a nonprofit to a for profit company. He started raising the alarm about AI’s use of copy written material to make OpenAI a profit.
In a new interview with KTVU his mother insisted there were things out of place in his “ransacked” apartment where his body was found four days before he was due to be called as a witness to the OpenAI case.
The New York Times wrote in October 2024, “But after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, he thought harder about what the company was doing. He came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.” His mother claims flash drives were taken during the murder that San Francisco authorities ruled was a suicide.
Amanda Gerut writes in Fortune Magazine, “President Trump on Tuesday announced an eye-popping investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the U.S., funded through a joint venture called the Stargate Project. According to Trump, the investment is likely to spur an increase of 100,000 jobs and will be accompanied by a spate of executive orders to ensure new data centers built in connection with the investment will have enough energy.”
A Scientific American article of October 2023 reported, “A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.”
The mantra of “saving the climate” may morph into “made in America” but America’s move to an electric future will march on. Robotic warfare preparation, digital surveillance and the production of autonomous vehicles will increase. Teslas will continue to roll off the assembly lines and the 15 Minute Smart City and the Internet of Things programs will advance. Essential features of the digital panopticon of Stargate.
We are facing an existential crisis and its time to unite the working class against this billionaire technocracy.
Anarchistcook's Weblog 