I leaned forward and lightly tapped the circle, stopping it from spinning.

“See?” Kouthoofd said, as if I had revealed the object’s purpose. I looked up at him, baffled.

Kouthoofd explained: “It’s, like, a tape recorder? But it spins?” His statements often came out like questions, particularly if he was speaking about one of his company’s products, as if everything were forever a prototype.

“Say we are having an interview,” he went on, as if we were not having an interview, “and I want to say something off the record, I can just hold it,” and he leaned forward again, lightly landing his finger on the disk. “It’s, like, an interaction, a nice interaction between us.” It was this interaction between humans and machines that most interested Kouthoofd, the tactile nature of it but also something more basic. To explain, he picked up another object from his desk and handed it to me. It was round like a hockey puck and heavy, and when you set it on a surface, it could spin.

“It’s a knob,” Kouthoofd said. “A very good knob. Also, a remote. And look!” He reached into his pocket and brought out a plastic snuff box and placed it next to the knob. They were the same size, which seemed to delight him.

This type of snuff was very popular in Sweden, Kouthoofd explained. After he saw these round boxes everywhere, their ubiquity had made him consider: What about turning that shape into a universal remote? The knob controlled the volume and tracks on a speaker Teenage Engineering made, but soon it would control many other things the company was in the process of making: a turntable, a tape deck, a light and a smoke machine.

He had been thinking about this knob quite a bit lately, he explained, because of a book he was reading, “The Myth of the Machine,” by Lewis Mumford. The myth of the machine is that we are its masters; in reality, Mumford argues, we eventually become a “trivial accessory to the machine,” following its logic and not our own. Mumford — a historian, philosopher, urban planner and the architectural critic at The New Yorker from the 1930s through the 1960s — defines technology broadly. A computer is technology. And so is money. And so are certain organizations, like corporations, that are mindlessly in tech’s thrall. Mumford calls these organizations “megamachines.” Technology, on its own, isn’t a problem. But the megamachine is. The megamachine is “the organized cult of machinery” and “a monster that can transform man into a passive, purposeless animal.”

Kouthoofd described “The Myth of the Machine” as a Marxist book, just as he describes himself as a Marxist (while acknowledging that his ownership of multiple Lamborghinis over the years might complicate this claim). His broad reading on Mumford was that most modern technology was simply a waste of time.