Search Party

Real Life

As Google’s first personal utterance, “I’m Feeling Lucky” was the company’s version of the Biblical “I Am Who I Am”: a declaration of omnipotence. Such audacity finds precedent in the inaugural statements of other Silicon Valley institutions. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, for instance, began with a manifesto declaring that “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Like the Catalog, Google was born in a different tech culture from our own — a different internet that Google in large part created. At the time of its founding, the company’s branding channeled a prevailing sense of leisure and optimism, and a democratic sensibility: The internet, and even its corporate culture, was about converting spectators to participants, outsiders to insiders. That sensibility has long since congealed into something resembling its opposite. Your search is not your own; it’s Google’s.

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