Started as a mere guest book by twenty-two-year-old Nathan Alexander for visitors to his popular page, Commercials I Hate (Alexander claims more than a million hits since opening the site three years ago -- not bad for a personal page), Commercials You Hate has evolved into a sort of primal click therapy for people enraged, astonished, disgusted, or otherwise freaked out by Gatorade ads where people sweat blue gunk, M&M ads that hint at cannibalism ("people wanting to eat the living M&M's is pretty revolting"), fast-food ads with ancient, animated Southern colonels trying and failing to sound hip -- it just goes on and on and on.

It's tough to say what's so refreshing about Commercials You Hate and sites of its ilk, but the appeal is not exclusively puerile. Maybe part of the answer lies in how one might discover these rough gems: Say you have a deeply annoying, Lilith Fair-type song from a car ad clinging to the inside of your skull for days on end. An exact-word Hotbot lyric search returns exactly one result. You click on it, and suddenly, arriving without warning at Commercials You Hate, you've found your tribe: scores of angry, like-minded commercial haters sharing stories, correcting one another's misconceptions, yelling and yawping and gleefully pissing all over Madison Avenue. Browsing among the grammatically challenged posts, many bristling with an almost poignant rage ("LEAVE OUR MUSIC ALONE, YOU BASTARDS!"), instantly recalls your own heady, primordial days on the Web, a long six or seven years ago, when it felt like the only people surfing on Mosaic and the infant Netscape were not there to make money or trade stocks or buy or sell cars or books or houses or Viagra, but were instead there because they'd found a place where they could join forces and learn new things, and, perhaps most elementally, voice their passions.

Of course it's easy to bemoan the commercialization and vulgarization of cyberspace, to weep and wail about the unsightly dollar stampede on "our" Web. But anyone who's honestly surprised that the Web has so rapidly become, to a large degree, a supercharged, demon-eyed cash cow should probably get out more often; expecting the world to ignore the Web's moneymaking power is naïveté of the saddest, blindest sort.

It's not naïve, though, to acknowledge an ongoing revolution, and if the Web is anything, it's revolutionary. Just because that fact has been repeated ad nauseam doesn't make it any less true, or any less astonishing. Yes, money changes everything; yeah, a lot of the geeky, hermetic romance of the early days is long gone; okay, the dot-com and IPO mania is a little unseemly, if not downright unsettling; sure, there's an almost unfathomably huge amount of useless crap out there, and the Web is merely helping to disseminate it at a more and more rapid rate. So what? The Web as we've come to know it -- whether we saw our first browser last year or in 1993 -- is still a very young beast. And it's still as protean as ever. It's a capitalist's dream, a bureaucrat's nightmare, a hacker's paradise, a shut-in's passport, a conspiracy theorist's bible, and, lest we forget, the most wonderful time-wasting device ever known.

In the midst of the current stock market lunacy (hey, the Nasdaq was down another 132 points Tuesday), anarchic sites like Commercials You Hate serve as timely reminders that the revolution has many fronts, and that there's still a lot to be said for providing outlets for good old unadulterated rage. After all, they also serve who only sit and vent.

Ben Cosgrove is FEED's Managing Editor.