(FORTUNE Magazine) – "Someone's going to win the lottery," says a television ad for online broker E*Trade. "Just not you." The new slew of e-brokers, on the other hand, have hit a jackpot, thanks to the market boom and--not coincidentally--their own advertising blitz. When SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt gave a May 4 speech warning that many e-traders aren't aware of the risks of online trading, he partly blamed brokers' recent spate of in-your-face ads. These spots are among TV's funniest and most original; they may also be among the most irresponsible.

The companies certainly dispute that--and few viewers are dense enough to believe in Discover Brokerage's helicopter-owning teenager or its tow-truck driver who earns enough by trading to buy his own island ("Technically, it's a country"). Then again, there's Ameritrade's suburban mom--a minivan master of the universe--who declares, "I think I just made about $1,700!" as her kids cheer and a friend confesses she owns...mutual funds.

But beyond their blatant penny-wise, pound-grubbing message, these ads show how the tech-fueled stock binge has changed our very conception of money. Witness, for starters, the new generation gap. In a hilarious, Seinfeldian E*Trade spot, a young employee asks for a raise while his elderly boss daydreams about the social hierarchy of the Jujubes in his candy dish. ("The green and the yellow--they're like peasants!") The ads' young, hip heroes--many look like they just walked out of a Matchbox 20 video--simply can't understand the older generation's lackadaisical attitude toward money. Do they think it grows on trees? In asset-allocated 401(k)s? The face of wealth for Madison Avenue is no longer John Houseman's. In a new Ameritrade ad, for example, the face of money can be found smushing itself against the office photocopier--or that's what a ponytailed hipster's doing when the boss comes to ask for his help e-trading. Pretty soon the guy's swinging his hips and making chicken noises, trying to goad the old man into buying more shares. This ain't stock, baby. This is stock & roll!

Time was, financial services companies likened themselves to sailing ships, trees, even rocks to convey permanence and trust; in e-trading ads, change is constant, no one can be trusted, and, in Fidelity's words, "The slow die first"--a perfect message for the era of The X-Files and collapsing economic safeguards. "We're not relying on the government," assert young TV investors for Suretrade. "We're betting on ourselves." Dude, Social Security's like, so over!

And work? It's for chumps. An unintentionally poignant E*Trade ad has an Albert Brooksian sad sack of a broker rolling off his waterbed at 4:45 A.M., clapping on the light, and schlepping to a Manhattan office, where he gets hung up on--for the first of many times, we feel sure--during a cold call: "If your broker is so smart," the ad asks, "why is he still working?"

Just who are these ads pitched to, anyway? The average multimillionaire, we hope, has better things to sweat over than stock commissions. Hard-core day traders move on to trading rooms and level-II Nasdaq screens. It's clock-punching channel surfers who want cheap e-trades. Someday they might be that old guy or gal with a big desk and a candy dish--if they're lucky. Yet the ads imply they're patsies: Don't they know enough to stop worrying about creating value and just ride the bubble into early retirement? Nor are online ads the only vehicles promoting this attitude. The May cover of FORTUNE's sister publication, Money, for instance, announced, EVERYBODY'S GETTING RICH! off Internet stocks. And if you're not, what does that make you?

Under criticism, Discover issued a statement supporting Chairman Levitt's vision of "an informed investing public who are aware of the risks as well as the rewards of investing." And Fidelity spokesperson Debra McConnell stresses that her company's campaign featuring Peter Lynch is all about "knowing what you own and why you own it." But are online brokerages--which, lest we forget, make money on each transaction--really selling "investing," or just trading itself? After all, a different Fidelity ad boasts, "When the bulls start running, you can bum a ride." Spoken like a true buy-and-holder.

Perhaps the controversy--and a planned summit on e-brokerage advertising--will temper future ads. (In one E*Trade spot, practically a public-service announcement about irrational exuberance, a man flamboyantly quits his job when an investment skyrockets, then returns to his desk to find that the stock has plunged.) But with the public looking at investing less like chess and more like "Doom," don't expect a return to "Get a piece of the rock" anytime soon. As our every-soccer-mom-for-herself nation welcomes the type-A trading culture into the family room, we're more likely to get, "You want a piece of me, punk?"

--James Poniewozik