When people describe publishing today, one phrase keeps surfacing: technical debt. Fragmented workflows, mismatched formats, vendors that don't integrate. From the outside it looks like an industry overdue for a teardown.

This session makes the opposite case. Publishing's fragmentation wasn't a mistake - it was the rational result of an industry built by craftsmen and entrepreneurs, never by system architects. But the ground has shifted. As the industry moves from optimizing for scale to optimizing for availability, and as AI agents and per-recipient personalization multiply the demands on every system, the real bottleneck has moved from production to coordination.

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The answer isn't to standardize and rebuild. It's to connect what already exists. A reframe for anyone thinking about where publishing infrastructure goes next.