Like so many other bad ideas, this one was supposed to last a millennium. Or at least a 100 years. But what have we all gotten of late from The Information Age or The New Economy or The World Wide Web -- or whatever pretending a network of ones and zeros is the world, when it's anything but.

How many years of dead solid progress has the data thing gotten us? Was it 20? Or even 10.

If my retirement savings accounts are like yours, they're stuck in the cyrofreeze, along with Matt Damon from the sci-fi picture "Intersteller." Not exactly dead for 15 years; but just sort of frozen in the ooze of the declining value of what we know. Are we more peaceful or safer? North Korea's Kim Jung-Un and the thugs behind Isis might think so. But you and I? Don't you feel trapped in a spooky digital copy of Sierra Leone, where virtual Ebola is the least of your worries. How much time do you spend every day making sure your online self does not get murdered? And are we more interesting or smarter? I'm certainly not. Last week I had to ski off-the-grid for a full morning to have this remarkable experience: an 11-minute conversation where no smartphone could be involved. "You know what, I can't remember who starred in The Revenant."

To turned out to err is human. But to forget? That was divine.

That's what I'm here to ask: What do we do with all this information now that all this information is all we have? What works. That's what I'm looking into with essays and lists and maps and charts and maybe some fiction. The truth has become so odd, openly making the stuff up is often the only sense that can be made.

And by all means, let me know where I go wrong: Can I recast a sentence or a paragraph in another way? Did I forgot a fact? Or a word or letter. I have a degree in Web Induced Mistypography. Let me know what can be clearer. I am happy to tweak or change.

Wouldn't we be better off publishing less and editing more?