The absurdity lies in pretending that infrastructure still dictates service when, in fact, services have become abstracted from the infrastructure that once defined them.

Email was once metaphorically aligned with postal mail because it mirrored a sequence of identifiable steps—sender, envelope, address, transport, delivery. But the metaphor is now an anchor. It drags with it legacy concepts like "inboxes," "postmaster," and "sending," when what actually happens is instantiation—content appears, synced or polled, with no van, no bag, no carrier.

Postal mail required physical intermediaries: boxes, post offices, uniformed workers. Email pretended to have these too—SMTP servers, MX records, mail clients. But now, these are modules. Optional. Invisible. Swappable. And if you squint, mostly irrelevant. You can receive email with no inbox. You can “send” without a sender. Identity is optional. Structure is divorced from essence.

We maintain “recognition” of services as if they are still coupled to a whole stack. But modularity exploded that illusion. You no longer need a post office to receive a letter. You no longer need a newsstand to publish a newspaper. You don’t need a university to learn, a bank to transact, or a theatre to perform.

The act of “service recognition” is revealed as pure theatre—ritual vestiges serving the comfort of bureaucracy. Structural separation was once a regulatory weapon (telcos and pipes, content and carriage). Now it is the native condition. A podcast isn't a radio show. A bitcoin transaction isn’t a bank transfer. An email isn't a letter.

Yet the accreditation systems, legal treatments, and mental models still behave as if the post office is involved.

It’s not. It left years ago.