> > There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself.

> How? It’s pretty much the point and purpose of civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation.

Civilization isn't necessary for this to be true. It is even true in small scale societies. You can observe this whenever they get cutoff from each other: they end up technologically regressing. It is more expensive to do everything themselves, so they end up losing access to technologies.

The world where this was last true was when the common ancestor of us and neanderthals were still around.