De Landa (1993):

… humans didn’t really invent machines. A hurricane is a motor in the literal sense, a motor defined as something with a heat reservoir that circulates heat through a Carnot cycle via differences of temperature. When a hurricane is born, a lot of self-organizing processes are involved that bring heat from the outside and concentrate it into a reservoir. In other words, it’s a self-assembled motor. That, to me, is a mind-blowing concept, because it took centuries before humans discovered the motor, something that self-assembles spontaneously in nature. […] So the machinic phylum is simply the notion that as soon as you let matter and energy in any form (whether it is organic or inorganic) flow in a nonlinear manner (that is, past a certain threshold of complexity) machines will tend to spontaneously self-assemble. The key word here is “nonlinear.” When you let matter and energy get far from equilibrium, spontaneously stabilized states called “attractors” emerge.

Still ahead of the culture, over two decades further on.