"E.T. is the model for American culture circa 1980," writes David Thomson in his new book Have You Seen ...? "In trying to give identity and a look to his magical creature, sometimes known as Puck, Steven Spielberg followed an old Disney concept: that people love the look of a baby, the wide brow, the clear, pure eye. So he pasted together a baby's face with a photo of Carl Sandburg's eyes, and the mixture of baby and sage was exquisite."

And so, too, was born Google, the alien baby-sage dropped onto Earth with a 300-year plan to help the human race fulfill its destiny or transcend itself or make way for a superior intelligence or something or other.

I've always thought of the Google story as the perfect Spielberg film. The nerdy kids in the basement tinkering with some info-age gizmo that their parents will never fully understand. The endearingly goofy innocence of the major characters. (Can't you see Larry Page and Sergey Brin sculpting a mountain out of mashed potatoes in the company cafeteria?) The vague intimations of some impending messianic event. Magical happenings conjured up by enormously expensive special effects. A colorful, toy-filled home called Googleplex. Everything enveloped in warm California light. And just beneath the surface, invisible to all the actors and perhaps even to the director himself: the shadow of misanthropy.

Randall Stross suggests that Google can't avoid being hurt by the economy's core meltdown. And he's right: yesterday, the company announced it was firing a hundred people in its HR function and consolidating its far-flung engineering crew. But the punishment of Google for the sins of others seems unfair. The Googlers stand at a very far remove from the scumbags and solipsists who brought this mess upon us. The Googlers may be Masters of the Universe, but their Universe is not a Universe of Greed. It's a Universe of Goodliness. Sure, there's the odd jumbo jet strung with hammocks and blessed with NASA landing rights, but we can chalk that up to boyish enthusiasm. Peter Pan needs to fly. No, we should all applaud Google for its disdain of business-as-usual, its impatience with soul-destroying corporate ritual. There's something to be said for real idealism rather than the simulations spun by marketers.

But Google isn't just a business. As the gatekeeper of our universal medium, it's now pretty much at the center of culture, our default arbiter of what we've come to call "content." And it's in that role that the alien baby-sage with Carl Sandburg's eyes seems not so much exquisite as creepy. The denizens of the Googleplex aren't happy unless they're measuring something with their little digital yardsticks, reducing some clumsy human activity to a streamlined algorithm. Just yesterday, as the company was announcing its cutbacks, the Official Google Blog was playing up Google Website Optimizer, an automated software tool that allows publishers to "eliminate guesswork from site design" and "increase visitor satisfaction." Google Website Optimizer's "intuitive reports allow even the mathematically-challenged to quickly and easily identify and implement the best combination." Google refers to this type of thing as deploying "the wisdom of the crowd," wisdom in this case meaning a mathematically determined average distilled through the meticulous measurement of a big mass of human behavior. Who needs designers - hell, who needs any individual humans with their intuitions and their imprecise judgments - when Google's machine will happily make all the decisions (and for free, of course)?

More efficiency! Greater optimization! Less guesswork!

I'm feeling my satisfaction increase already.