[throwaway290]

I think the key is "world".

If you yourself can cut a tree down and do whatever else to make a piano, there's no world created by humans. It'll take you a while but in the end there's only you and your shiny new piano and nature.

If there is a distributed process with countless people and organizations using intricate mechanisms to build components of mechanisms that build mechanisms that extract natural resources for building mechanisms for preparing different parts that are eventually put together as a piano (which itself is almost a side effect, a minor detail almost no participant of the process sees or even knows about)... that's a world. If you click a button and have this thing show up at your house and not know a bit about what goes into it much less do it yourself... that's a world.

[coldtea]

>If there is a distributed process with countless people and organizations using intricate mechanisms to build components of mechanisms that

And then someone will go on being pedantic and bring forward bees and ant colonies and the like. Let's call it "a matter of degree/scale/breadth" this might shut them up!

[throwaway290]

I was going to point out that it is kind of a spectrum but decided to try and see what I can make of binary differentiation. You're right it's not great, too vague, writing doesn't like that and favors black and white thinking and neat causality chains, but few are able to see it as a limitation of writing as medium instead of how things "actually" are.