McLuhan got it mostly right, but this may be understood 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 geochemical battery trickle-charged over hundreds of millions of years and discharged in the last two centuries.

Implicit in the quotation, but important 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 we can't reproduce without an ecobiological cocoon.

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