Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.

Goodman contrasts an older sense of being “plain people”—whole, idiosyncratic individuals—with the modern experience of living through large, impersonal systems (bureaucracies, computers, automated services). Her point is not that machines are evil, but that sustained interaction with “mechanical systems” pressures us to translate ourselves into what the system can register: numbers, categories, inputs, and outputs. In that translation, the human being becomes a “factor” in an equation—measurable, comparable, and replaceable—rather than a person with context and dignity. The quote captures a recurring late-20th-century anxiety: efficiency and standardization can quietly erode empathy and individuality.