Just Let Me Check One Last Thing . . .

Sun., Aug. 31, 12:24 p.m. May as well just glance at my e-mail.

It was a pretty big deal when Google opened up its Maps service, a runaway success in the half-year following its launch, to outside programmers at the end of 2005. Within months, Google Maps lived on thousands of domains, bursting fully formed from the swollen bodies of the static MapQuest graphics they replaced. It's a textbook symbiotic relationship: Companies such as Zipcar get good maps, and Google gets a fresh vein of user-experience data and a new host for millions of unblinking eyestalks.

Just last weekend, Google made another splash by taking the multicolored curtain off Chrome, an open-source, state-of-the-art Web browser that promises to greatly increase the performance of data-rich applications such as Google Maps. It also promises to make Chrome the platform upon which future applications are designed to run, potentially squeezing out competitors less willing to innovate. I really hope this helps Google find whatever unholy pattern of human behavior they're looking for, because the next step from here is demanding that we simply hand over our brains.

Sun., Aug. 31, 6:26 p.m. Stuck in Manhattan traffic at the wheel of the aforementioned Zipcar, which came to me almost entirely without gas. I narrow my eyes at the phone I might ordinarily use to search locally for gas stations -- it doesn't even occur to me to try Yahoo -- when it rings with a call from my parents. They offer to find the nearest Hess station. Reluctantly, I ask for their source. A chill runs down my spine.

When I was in middle school, I used to wish that I had a magic watch (obviously a computer, but it fit inside a watch) that knew everything and could tell me whatever I wanted to know, usually something along the lines of, "Here's a list of the girls who like you." Not that I would have known what to do with that information: I had a girlfriend in middle school, but we never got past seeing a movie with eight friends and not taking our snow jackets off. I wouldn't have shared that with you if I didn't think Google knew about it already. Like the watch, Google knows a me that's far more detailed and complete than the one I'm familiar with.

Mon., Sept. 1, 1:15 p.m. Having at least survived 24 hours without Gmail, I resolve to break that particular seal. Which feels a bit like charging into the garage after the third partygoer doesn't come back from "just getting a beer." But instead of the mind-numbing terror and abject, babbling insanity I expect to wash over me, there are just a few new messages and the same unanswered old ones. "Home again," I think to myself, ignoring whatever just slithered behind my inbox.

Between us, I don't consider Google immoral. But the blind application of algorithms we don't fully understand onto collections of data so vast, rich and personal is fundamentally amoral -- we don't know what we're going to find. You and I don't know, anyway. Larry and Sergey are probably on one of their jets right now, partying with the ancient crone, laughing about their confidential knowledge of a Fortune 500 CEO's penchant for Lego porn.

I went into this experiment fairly certain that it would require the cursory change of an odd habit or two. I learned that my dependence on Google runs deeper than that, encompassing not only my personal Internet use but the nested dependencies of the people and institutions surrounding me. This is perhaps less a celebration of Google's tenth birthday than it is the harrowing revelation of our tenth anniversary. So goodnight, dear Google -- congratulations, and sweet dreams.

robdubbin@gmail.com

Rob Dubbin is a writer for "The Colbert Report."