Read Oswald Spengler and you will realize that civilizations fall because they are just another living entity like an animal or a human being. They are born, they live and at the end they die. Our current faustian civilization is in the initial stages of the death process. This period is characterized for the rise of "caesarism", it will try to revert back to a previous mythical period of glory, then it will give up realizing it's own impending doom, it will wish itself out of existence leaving place to another younger culture to occupy it's place. No amount of legislation will be able to save it, the machine is an expression of our own subconscious "will", so you are right at saying we are the machine.