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There is one advantage, though, that no one can take away from the "little guy": net.culture has no mercy on the humorless. Large corporations are not known for being able to take a joke. Microsoft's Web-based publication, Slate, was followed almost immediately onto the Net by a word-perfect and hilarious parody called Stale, just as Wired is shadowed by ReWired: The Journal of a Strained Net and the Net itself is told not to take itself so seriously on the sardonic Web site Suck ("A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun").[19]

It is not clear that what we now know as net.culture will survive. Besides the blows of attempted censorship, sudden growth, legal battles, and other types of legislation that have bonded the Net together as a community, the Net is under siege from the many commercial interests who want to exploit what they perceive as a virgin medium. It is fashionable to claim that the Net has the greatest democratizing potential of any medium ever invented; but as writer Todd Lappin pointed out in Wired, that's what they said about the medium we now know as commercial radio.[20]