We've made the world too complicated

Isn't empathy the better term here?

In the vast majority of developed nation cities, drinking water comes from reservoirs and goes through whatever treatment is required to make it potable.

Anything that goes down the drain is then treated at a sewage treatment facility and is then dumped into a river/ocean/whatever. Sometimes it’s used for toilet water in large facilities like airports and they put warnings all over everything that it’s not potable because it came from sewage.

There are a few cities with cutting edge “piss to table” technology, but it’s not the norm. The closest you get normally is when an upriver city discharges into a river used downstream.

> argue that capitalism (lower-case) is as old as humans. Was not the shift away from hunter-gatherer a capitalist choice?

What's the difference between capitalism and Capitalism? Are you just describing the act of exchanging resources as capitalism? The Soviet Union fed its workers (usually lol), was that exchange of resources "capitalism?"

This isn't a really accurate use of terms, and imo is an example of the hypernormalization of capitalism, or as the op said, reification. There's a tendency in people to believe that things that existed as recently as a day before they were born, have existed for essentially forever, and are as certain as gravity. In reality, capitalism, which is the private ownership of the means of production in service of accumulating capital, is as stated very young. We have about 25,000 years of human society operating without capitalism.

Trade is not capitalism, nor did the switch to agrarian society represent a capitalist choice. It's frankly a bog standard example of primitive communism. Fields were owned in common by a society, worked in common, reaped in common, consumed in common. Depending on the society, you might have elders, matriarchs, patriarchs etc that determined how resources would be allocated (e.g. successful hunters getting more, spiritual leaders getting more, assholes getting less), but those people weren't "owners" by our capitalist understanding. Nobody paid them rent.

Furthermore, one village trading with another e.g. ox for squash or whatever, isn't capitalism. Even if the ox were "privately owned," and exchanged for e.g. a dowry, the land on which the ox feeds is still owned in common, and such resources were still generally expected to be shared in emergency or for religious or cultural events. Depending on the society of course, but it's a pretty common thread throughout history - the gift economy, and primitive communism.

I think it's very important to keep clear on terms and our history, because dogmatism can cast our feet in concrete and prevent us from trying new, exciting things that are possibly more well suited for the times. One could argue that the global takeover by capitalism is evidence of its effectiveness in all aspects of organizing society, I would say it's more likely to be evidence at its effectiveness of spreading and consuming societies while regulating them just enough to prevent their collapse. Efficient? Hardly - look at the wealth disparity between Apple shareholders and the factory workers that throw themselves off buildings after making the phones that generate apple's fat profit margins. How is that efficient? Therefore I want to push back on this idea of capitalism as gravity to leave us room to explore new ideas.

The issue is not primarily psychological attachment to objects, but that private labor (labor carried out independently by separate producers, whose social validity is only realized through exchange) takes on the appearance of its opposite: labor in a directly social form through exchange. Through exchange, the values of commodities appear to individuals not as a relation between producers, but as a property inherent in things themselves. Use-value appears as value, concrete labor appears as abstract labor, private labor appears as social labor.

This has a ton of effects. Some of the most important: it obscures exploitation (profit appears to derive from capital/risk/trade/etc., i.e. anything but labor), it naturalizes capitalism (markets, competition, money, and wage labor seem transhistorical), it disempowers producers (alienation), and it produces ideological mystification in general (people attribute to greed, unfair exchange, moral failure, production scale, division of labor, or technologies what should be attributed to the specific historical form of labor).

So your example is probably a third-order effect of commodity fetishism.

This condensation of the concept really sucked. I suggest struggling through Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1.

> glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either

Until they become a focusing mirror that turns into a gigantic magnifying glass, see: the Walkie Talkie building. Evidently, glass buildings are hard enough that even with hundreds of engineers, there still ends up being second order effects that are unaccounted for in many designs.

Building a skyscraper with glass windows means understanding the physics of light, geography, the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun, materials science etc.