Bertrand Gille (60s/70s historian of technology) had an interesting hypothesis, that as technical systems, and coupled technical-economic systems (e.g. large corporations built on technical advances) get complex, interdependent, and rapidly changing, at some point it becomes too difficult for humans to fully understand and control their workings and evolution, and the dependencies make even choosing which technologies you "want" to use highly constrained, all of which leads to somewhat of an inversion of control.
Rather than technology being a tool, of which humans ask, "what do I want to use this tool for?", instead there is this evolving technical-economic system that you have no choice but to interact with, and what you need to ask of yourself is, "how can I make myself useful to this system?" I.e., given the technical-economic system of your present moment, which you only understand a part of, where do you fit yourself in so you can be a tool that that system finds useful to employ towards its ends (whatever those might be)? Alternately, he hoped there was a way to re-invert the inversion of control, but no word on success on that front...
Unfortunately it's mostly all piled into Gille's magnum opus, the 1500-page History of Techniques (1978), which to make matters worse is out of print in English and sells for absurd prices online (though some university libraries have it).
I read it mostly second-hand via Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time, which is widely available in English and summarizes Gille extensively in the beginning portions. That's an okay intro in the purely summary parts, but is tied up in Stiegler's own project of somehow re-theorizing what time means via a mixture of technical evolution and Heideggerian philosophy, which may not be what you're interested in (I found it a bit over my head, but I'm not at all versed in Heideggerian philosophy). Maybe since it's caused a bit of a revival in interest in Gille, someone will re-print an English translation, or a good secondary work.
Oddly his only work that is widely available in English, Engineers of the Renaissance, is quite good but has none of this in it; it's just a straightforward, well-researched history of Renaissance-era engineering.
I heard about stigler through the excellent documentary "Der Ister"[1] which was a very good treatment of time and heidegger's philosophy of technology. Thanks for the info on this other book.
Interesting; I'd heard about that but there weren't any screenings near me, but it looks like it's out on DVD now. Maybe I'll watch. In my day job I'm "just" a technologist, but I like to keep up on history/philosophy of technology as well, when possible.
Incidentally, it appears you can also read Stiegler via Twitter, possibly to his chagrin (he's made some skeptical comments about what Twitter does for thought/communication): https://twitter.com/TechnicsAndTime
From what you describe that does sound like the system we have always been under. I.e if you want to advance your position, and you need money to do so, you best find somebody who has them and make yourself useful to them.
Rather than technology being a tool, of which humans ask, "what do I want to use this tool for?", instead there is this evolving technical-economic system that you have no choice but to interact with, and what you need to ask of yourself is, "how can I make myself useful to this system?" I.e., given the technical-economic system of your present moment, which you only understand a part of, where do you fit yourself in so you can be a tool that that system finds useful to employ towards its ends (whatever those might be)? Alternately, he hoped there was a way to re-invert the inversion of control, but no word on success on that front...