I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated. To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content.

We need to think about containers as an option, not the starting point. Further, we must start to open up access, making it possible for readers to discover and consume our content within and across digital realms.

Without a shift in mindset, we are vulnerable to a range of current and future disruptive entrants. Containers limit how we think about our audiences. In stripping context, they also limit how audiences find our content.

Here, scale is not our friend. It may well be the enemy. As Clay Christensen first outlined in 1997, disruptive technologies don’t look or feel like what we typically value. Often enough, they are cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient than their traditional analogues.

Behind the creation of the American republic was another republic, which made the Constitution thinkable. This was the Republic of Letters—an information system powered by the pen and the printing press, a realm of knowledge open to anyone who could read and write, a community of writers and readers without boundaries, police, or inequality of any kind, except that of talent. Like other men of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers believed that free access to knowledge was a crucial condition for a flourishing republic, and that the American republic would flourish if its citizens exercised their citizenship in the Republic of Letters.

I learned that a Bhakti yogi enters a room full of people and methodically moves this thing up and down—by telling stories and getting everyone to speak in unison and chant and sing—it’s like an invisible barometer he’s affecting: the quality of people’s togetherness in the room. That’s the bhav. I felt now that that was my job, to move it.

I’m also saying that a life has a bhav. A day has one. A poem is charting that. Perhaps giving the sweetest documentation of what anything is ever becoming. So a book of poems for instance over a short period of time, a year or two explains the bhav of that period and the poet approaches the explanation through form, she invents one that is most economically true to how reality occurred to her at that time.