One of the most sensible books I've read about how technology works, from an economic perspective, is The Nature of Technology, by Brian Arthur. It talks about how different technologies interact with each other, and with the economy, and how what he calls standard engineering, which mostly involves assembling off-the-shelf parts, contributes to the advancement of technology as a whole.

A lot of the concepts he talks about can be experienced by using an open source operating system with package management, such as Ubuntu. At least, as I was reading the book, a lot of open source software examples came to mind.

Brian Arthur was involved in the founding of the Santa Fe institute that studies complexity.