The Tearing of the Illusion: A Materialist Intervention Against Digital Capitalism’s Myth of "Goodness" and the Call to "Pace the Frontier"

Dear young comrades, true owners of mental and physical labor!

Before us today stands a manifesto that has broken loose from the depths of Silicon Valley and been signed by 1,224 people who work at technology companies. Titled Pacing the Frontier, the text is cast as a security cry that worries over humanity’s future. We know that deep loneliness and sense of suffocation you feel in capital’s data centers, in surveillance towers, in isolated home offices, and in the cold shadow of algorithms. Late capitalism has draped over you not only an economic net of exploitation, but also a vast ideological net that whispers that “everything is your own fault or your own choice.”

As we argued at length in our earlier piece Digital Capitalism, the Illusion of “Goodness,” and the Material Reality of Class Struggle, the poisoned apple the bourgeois world offers you is nothing but the illusion of “staying clean” by withdrawing onto islands of individual conscience. Silicon Valley’s false prophets, the charlatans of “Effective Altruism,” and the liberal spokespeople of the order keep writing you the same pacifist prescription: “The system may be bad, but you be a good person. Work at the right company, consume ethical products, refuse projects that unsettle your conscience, and become an individual hero by writing the magic code that will change the world.”

As we stated plainly in that essay: however delicate, cultured, artistically sensitive, or humanist a capitalist may be as an individual, from the moment they appear on the economic stage they are nothing other than the personification of capital (Personifikation des Kapitals). Under capitalism, competition is not the capitalists’ inner desire; it is an external law of compulsion that the market imposes on every capitalist.

Let us pocket this basic truth and examine this new appeal—the “Pacing the Frontier” manifesto—through a historical-materialist lens, at the intersection of technology, sociology, and anthropology. What confronts us is nothing other than a digital expression of late capitalism’s structural crises and class contradictions.

The Contradiction Between the Forces and Relations of Production: The Property Wall of Physical Infrastructure

The call text speaks of the risk that, as AI research is automated, capability development will accelerate beyond our ability to understand and control it. Company employee Shengjia Zhao notes that leading laboratories are very close to AI that could surpass human intelligence on nearly every metric, and that this would open unprecedented social and security risks.

Recall Marx’s famous law: at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production (the property relations). Precisely that is what we are witnessing. The productive forces (artificial intelligence) no longer fit the narrow molds of private property and profit maximization. This document is the confession—made by those who themselves produce this colossal power—that it cannot be managed rationally and for society’s benefit within existing capitalist relations. As Google employee Matthew Rahtz also notes, the recent pace of advance in AI capabilities has produced a “shock” effect, and far better coordination is needed to prevent catastrophes that could arise from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

Yet it is incomplete to read this contradiction only through the “speed” of abstract algorithms. Dialectical materialism teaches that the productive forces are not only “software,” but also the “infrastructure” that brings that software into being. As we have pointed out before, no matter how “decentralized,” “encrypted,” or “libertarian” an application you design at the software level (for example Signal, Nostr, or an open-source AI model), there remains an impassable wall of material infrastructure that software must cross in order to meet society.

Today the physical infrastructure of the digital productive forces collides with enormous property walls:

• Hardware and Ecosystem Monopoly: Applications depend on Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. Those two giant monopolies, which own the operating systems, can wipe the most “libertarian” project off the map with a single contract termination.

• Physical Infrastructure and Server Monopoly (Cloud Monopolies): All these systems—including the training of AI—live on the servers of vast data centers such as Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), or Google Cloud. Finance capital, which holds the electricity, the cooling systems, and thousands of GPUs, has the power to throw the switch whenever it wishes.

• Network Infrastructure and ISPs: The fiber-optic cables through which information flows, the undersea data lines, and the 5G base stations are the private property either of imperialist states or of telecommunications monopolies locked to the state.

Thus the problem of the “uncontrolled development of the productive forces” that the manifesto’s signatories point to arises not only from the complexity of the code, but from the fact that the hardware, servers, and network infrastructure that run that code are under the yoke of a narrow monopolistic property (the relations of production). The productive forces have been socialized (they have come to use the General Intellect, humanity’s common mind), yet property remains in private hands. That is the real lock of the contradiction. So long as the property of the physical means of production is not socialized, the capital order will use every initiative undertaken in the name of “safety” or “pacing the frontier” merely to protect its own infrastructure monopoly.

The Peak of Alienation: The Worker Who Cannot Master What They Have Created

Perhaps the most striking anthropological dimension of the text is the deep alienation highly skilled technology workers experience toward the products of their own labor. Leo Gao says the world is locked into a deadly race toward an intelligence explosion, in which AI’s ability to create better AIs reaches a critical point like a nuclear chain reaction out of control.

Yet the centuries-old bourgeois fairy tales of a “creative class” and a “free genius” have collapsed. Today’s technology worker, despite colorful offices or espresso machines, is a mental proletarian who owns only one thing that can be sold on the market—mental labor-power—and who hands that power over to a capitalist. Just as capital deskilled artisans in the industrial revolution, today it is turning mental labor, through coding tools and automation, into a standardized form of manual labor.

In transforming nature, the human being transforms themselves. Under capitalism, however, the worker is alienated from the object they produce; that object now stands opposite the worker as an alien power that rules and threatens them. The existential crisis of the 1,224 signatories is the possibility that the code they themselves wrote will turn into a social catastrophe. The worker has become not the master of the machine they created, but a spectator who begs for its speed to be slowed.

This crisis goes beyond classical industrial alienation: it is humanity’s alienation from its own language, cognitive capacities, and common intelligence (the General Intellect). Every moment of alienation that Marx describes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 has taken flesh and bone in Silicon Valley today:

1. Alienation from the Product: The code produced by the programmer’s labor is objectified in capital’s hands and returns to its creator as an alien force—as a migrant-tracking algorithm, a mass-surveillance tool, or a military drone guidance system.

2. Alienation from the Act of Production: Mental labor that ought to be creative and free is subordinated to capital’s profit margins or to the soulless necessities of the military-surveillance apparatus (for example Palantir, Project Maven).

3. Alienation from Human Species-Being: Humanity’s function of beautifying nature and society (its species-being) is destroyed when algorithms are written that bomb or file people en masse.

4. Alienation of Human from Human: The mental laborer is isolated from, and alienated toward, the oppressed peoples who eat the bombs of the code they wrote, the precarious African workers who label data, or even the colleague at the next desk.

The demand to “slow down” in this call text is a historical and class moment of horror in which the mental proletariat confronts this technological Frankenstein it has created with its own hands—the destructive power of its own labor.

The Law of Competition and the Dead End of Monopoly Capitalism

One of the most honest confessions in the statement is this: “Yet every company and country is under intense competitive pressure not to slow this acceleration unilaterally.” Leo Gao also stresses that no individual actor is willing to stop unilaterally, and that coordination is needed in order to slow down. OpenAI researcher Shantanu Jain admits that there is no sign of progress slowing, and that by default it is in the interest of individual companies and countries to push the technological frontier.

Here lies capital’s iron law and dialectical impasse! Capitalist competition forces capitalists or company managers, against their will, to invest, to innovate, and to seize market share. Capital accumulation is not a race; it is a necessity of existence.

As we detailed in “Digital Capitalism and the Illusion of Goodness,” the market mechanism systematically destroys any “good” or “conscientious” slowing. What happens if a technology giant (for example Google or Anthropic) says, “This AI model (AGI) is too dangerous for society; I am stopping the investment”?

1. Competition as an External Compulsion: That company’s rival (for example OpenAI or Meta) does not share the same ethical concern and brings the model to market.

2. Flight of Capital and Elimination: The shares of the company that stopped on ethical grounds crash; stock-market investors (shareholders) pull their capital. The company loses profitability and R&D capacity and vanishes from the competitive market.

This manifesto is the clearest evidence from inside the technology world of how capitalist competition is driving humanity toward the abyss. Contrary to what bourgeois individualism claims, “free entrepreneurs” are not the masters of the system but its slaves. As Micah Carroll (Misalignment Preparedness, OpenAI) notes with concern, “Under international competitive pressures, margins for error will grow ever smaller.” The system is so irrational that the owners of capital are compelled to finance at full throttle a process that may cause their own destruction (a possible catastrophe arising from AGI), merely so they will not lose today’s market share. Market anarchy is the enemy of rational social planning.

Looking to the Bourgeois State for Salvation: The Search for Hegemony

So what do they propose as a solution? They demand that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to consciously set the boundary of automated AI development. Anthropic employee Christian Ryan even calls a U.S.-backed effort “existential not only for the freedoms of the free world, but for everyone’s well-being.”

Young comrades, here is ideology in its purest form. To solve a problem that springs from the private ownership of the means of production, they call for help from the bourgeois state—the global guardian of that private property (and moreover the heart of U.S. imperialism). To speak of “an international effort” and “governance tools” is not merely to halt AI development; it is to consolidate control of this technology in the hands of imperialist states and technology monopolies. This call is, in essence, the desire to build a regulatory barrier that would secure the capitalist hierarchy.

When CEOs such as Sam Altman or Dario Amodei lobby parliaments with cries of “AI is very dangerous; it could destroy humanity” and pour millions of dollars into political campaigns, it is not to protect humanity. The aim is, through the strategy called “Regulatory Capture,” to have the state impose licensing conditions in the name of “safety,” to shut out independent open-source developers with cost/license barriers, and to close the AI market to their own monopolies. The monopoly formed in the market is now to be fortified behind the violence and legal force of the state.

Conclusion: What Is to Be Done?

As signatory Edward Hughes notes, citing technology historian Melvin Kranzberg, technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. The question is which class holds this colossal productive power (the General Intellect).

That you personally have not soiled your hands does not stop the capitalist death machine from finding someone else from the “Reserve Army of Labor” to put in your place. Someone else will write the war code you refused; someone else will take the extravagant monopoly salary you declined. The illusion of “staying clean” through conscientious pacifism does not transform the system. What we need is not capital’s favor or becoming a “good boss,” but our right over the whole of the value we produce.

This is not a matter of “cleanliness” limited to protecting our conscience from capitalism’s dirt. Our vision is to socialize this immense technological capacity, to free it from the shackles of the profit motive and the law of competition, and to place it under the command of a democratic planning that meets humanity’s needs. Our ultimate aim is to tear these productive forces—humanity’s common heritage—from the hands of the capitalists who have enclosed them. If we are the ones who produce, we will be the ones who govern! We will not stop until servers, fiber networks, data centers, and code libraries become humanity’s common commune (the commons).

The struggle is not to cut the speed of algorithms, but to take ownership of the algorithms and of their physical infrastructure. We must build our class alliance with the data proletariat, with logistics workers, and with manual laborers; unite the keyboard and the wrench on the same barricade; and turn the power of mental labor into a collective weapon of digital strike.

Leave fear to the masters of capital. Close ranks!