It's a bit difficult to unpack your question because so many different and divergent concepts and aspects are lumped into this word #technology. Its primary image, that of a #tool, is contrasted with the results of its application, and stuff (material or immaterial) that serves a #purpose. Also layers of generality: of practical knowledge; generalised procedures to effect impacts; strata of consequences that in themselves have such consequential "power" that people have only few ways to influence and change courses of events.

Thus to me two things turned out to be important over the years:

° thinking about technology via the image of "tools" is devastaingly inappropriate

° thinking about technology deflects from the perhaps more important topic of #infrastructure

To me, the history of infrastructure(s) began to replace questions about technology or its history.

With "infrastructure" I don't mean merely places, built environments, supply chains and innovations therein (e.g., the innovation of the shipping container in the 1930s and its standarisation in the 1960s which proved decisive in the Vietnam war). It entails concepts of #energy density, of market economies, of sustainibility...

But more to your point: I find the most fitting metaphor for technology to be that of a #game. Be it competitve games, be it solitary games, be it "new games". The aspect of playfullness is more important than earlier generations of tech critique may have acknowledged.