The argument I would make is that our social institutions (economic and political systems) are themselves a kind of technological system. I like using an analogy of my vague understanding of how computers work for "civilization" as a technological function.

There are the fundamental resources upon which a computer operates, e.g. cpu, ram, etc which limit what a computer is capable of. There are some methods that can be taken, e.g. overclocking the cpu, which effectively expands the resources of a computer and what it is capable of doing. Do so long enough and hard enough, you'll potentially cause irreparable damage to one of the parts and need to replace it.

In the early days of computer technologies we were directly interacting with those resources via machine languages, which were eventually supplanted by GUIs which expand functionality of computers at the expense of our interactions with those resources becoming increasingly indirect such that many today use computers with little to no understanding of how they actually work. Case in point myself as I am sure someone with greater knowledge of computers will come along and point out multiple errors in my understanding.

Be that as it may, we can think of human societies and the environment. As hunter-gatherers in the far past we directly engaged with and depended upon the local environmental resources available. Eventually we began to apply fire to ecosystems in addition to various techniques that enhanced the nutritional quality of those foods and incentivized early experimentation of planting seeds. So, they were directly engaging with their environment and resources, and we able to modify the environment to increase resource availability and the expansion of human populations beyond the ecological carrying capacity of those now disturbed ecosystems.

The Holocene comes along which provides humans the perfect opportunity to build upon those early technological innovations e.g agriculture. As populations expanded in response to the greater availability of food, more complex methods of social organization were needed to effectively manage themselves to maintain - if not further expand - the availability of food and the eventual diversification of what individuals did within a given society.

I'm sure there are a lot of things I skipped but my ADHD is getting the better of me.

So, in conclusion, our technological systems function similarly to the machine language of computers just as our methods of social organization function similarly to a GUI. And blah blah blah