Last night I watched one of the more interesting DVDs I own: Pi, a bleak film about brilliance, madness and obsession. The outside plot centers on the endeavors of Max Cohen, a mathematician who is haunted by what he believes is a pattern to be found in the numbers of the stock market. In his pursuit he stumbles upon a 216-digit number; this number, while initially discounted by Max, becomes coveted by both a Wall Street firm as well as Hasidic Jews, both of whom see great value in this number but seek it for different ends.

As with most well-written movies with a misunderstood and complex protagonist, there is a mentor character who acts as a both challenge to the protagonist’s motivating action as well a vessel for offering an exposition to us, the audience, in an attempt to help us understand the backstory as well as the reason for the need for resolution following the build up of “Act 1″.

In this movie, Sol (Max’s mentor) comments that the 216-digit number is really meaningless because,

“You’re connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.”

And for me, 216 is Google.

It feels like Google is appearing in more blogs and articles I’ve been reading lately than the articles that announced their much-anticipated IPO (by the way, in case you missed it, their stock price is down, as of this writing, to $632.07 from $700 last week):

• Recently, a story in The Guardian reported that Google Earth was being used by “Palestinian militants …to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets”;

• A column on PBS’s site, written by Bob Cringely, suggests that Google is the next Microsoft in that it would appear that getting a favorable nod from the folks on Wall Street while “…modifying algorithms and launching new programs…[which] is always seeking at least the appearance of improvement, but not to Google’s AdWords customers.”Aren’t those AdWords customers (besides happy investors) the ones who helped make Google what it is today?;

• Supplemental to Bob’s article, my friend, Rose Sylvia, points out in her article, Google AdWords is Broken, what should be obvious by now: that “[M]any online-only businesses derive 70-90% of their sales from Google. Few realize that most of their other sales are also dependent on Google traffic.”

• And, most recently, Wired reported that Google is trying to muscle it’s way into the zeitgeist of social networking with OpenSocial, which is “… basically three APIs bundled together that allows developers to roll out the same application across a number of participating social networks.” That’s great if you don’t mind handing over even more personal data to Google for it’s own purposes and profit.

With it’s ubiquitous name (which is apparently commonly considered a verb, as in “I Googled you and… wow!”), simple web page, free applications (read: more data mining) and unchecked expansion into not only life online but terrestrial, flesh-and-blood life, it would seem that, by all appearances, it is a Frankenstein monster created and fed by its users.

But can those users free themselves from the monster to which they’ve given life?