In The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison argue that capitalism is always in search of new frontiers to colonialise, exploit and leave. This process of "Boom, Bust, Quit" drives the engine of capitalism and its story of perpetual growth. As the world's resources get increasingly used up, capitalists have become increasingly desperate, seeking to colonise inhospitable environments such as space and even inventing new frontiers to exploit.

The Technology Hype Cycle is a distillation of this process: A new technological concept such as digital currency, virtual reality, or the transformer model becomes a new frontier as capitalists race to become the biggest exploiter. Eventually, the frontier collapses under the weight of its own hype, leaving capitalists scrambling to find a new technology to take on this role. When a new one is found, the cycle continues.

These digital frontiers have physical impacts: the energy for wasted computation is transformed into carbon dioxide and the mines used to extract raw materials wreck local environments. In this way, the Technology Hype Cycle is both a key driver of and a symptom of the larger global systems crisis, where the exploitative demand for perpetual growth hits the physical limits of a finite Earth.