[walleeee]

McLuhan got it mostly right, but may be interpreted in a way which mischaracterizes wealth. Machines do not create value ex nihilo. Machines allow us to more effectively harvest or transform materials or information, to which we assign value. All wealth currently accessible to us derives from the sun. The vast majority of our present wealth comes from a massive battery trickle-charged over hundreds of millions of years and discharged in the last two centuries.

Implicit in the quotation, but critical to recognize, is that technology is the tip of a vast edifice whose foundation is not us. We and our machines are perched (too precariously for comfort) at the top. We are the sex organs of the machine world because machines can't reproduce without us. But machines are not the sex organs of the human world. Human beings require an ecobiological cocoon. We've also spun an elaborate technological cocoon in recent history, largely by sacrificing the long-term integrity of more fundamental life support.

Everything of value in the human economy is downstream of this. We too often take it for granted and assume the only relevant economic inputs are capital and labor, or we will innovate our way out of materials-, energy- and ecosystem-dependence.