I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world and machines - TV telephone cars - were still more or less ancillary and computers were unheard of in everyday life.
That a society controls to a greater or lesser extent the behavior of its members is a universal but the methods the particulars of that control vary from one culture to another.
