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Off the top of my head, four different concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful.

Lewis Mumford's "megamachine" -- the notion that the ur-technology that drove its evolution was the way rulers and their muscle allied with priests to build pyramids and irrigation projects by treating people as components in a hierarchical machine with overseers at every level.

Heidegger is mostly impenetrable to me, but I latched onto his notion of a "standing reserve." Humans make use of the world, (...more)