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/
This article comes at the perfect time, your insights on how tech and policy failures intersect are incredebly important. Thank you for shedding light on these real-world consequences, especially the human cost of AI job displacement and system shutdowns.