Today we plug our levers into a wall socket. An amplifier is just an updated version of the lever, designed to take advantage of modern power sources. Today technology provides each of us with unbelievable amounts of power to effect not our only ourselves but those close by and at a distance. In retrospect history seems to have been kind. We were allowed a few millennia of relative down time between agricultural and industrial revolutions, then a few centuries respite before the information age urged us into overdrive.
All interactions are transactional, whether between people or people and machines.
That is, we can not come into contact with anything and not become at least a little like the thing itself, whether mineral, vegetable, animal, or digital. Because a machine is programmed with such limited behavioral capabilities, we, the adaptable ones, submit to it much more than it to us. And because tools are just ideas with clothes on, we become not only like the tool, but like the social forces behind them. The things we think we control because we made them and therefore presume to understand and have dominion over them, actually control us by our unconscious design. We remain useless until we bend to the limitations they impose.