We do not rule, we are ruled. The thing, the world, rules man. Man is a prisoner, a slave of the world, and his rule is illusion. Technology is the power with which the earth grips man and subdues him. And because we rule no more, we lose the ground, and then the earth is no longer our earth, and then we become strangers on earth. We do not rule because we do not know the world as God’s creation, and because we do not receive our dominion as God-given but grasp it for ourselves. There is no “being-free-from” without “being-free-for.” There is no dominion without serving God.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Creation and Fall” in Careation and Fall; Temptation: Two Biblical Studies, 42.