Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters

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Description

The internet is no longer new, it is part of our everyday lives, and as a commonplace, we rarely take time to contemplate what we have made together. In these moments the old criteria are shattered: play becomes work, joy is monetised, private creativity is policed by the corporations. The platforms offer us a devil's bargain: they force us to pay through our own creativity, which is then repossessed and turned into value.

The internet was first made by amateurs, but has gone on to make amateurs of us all: Toktok dancers, wikipedia editors, Reddit monitors; Insta stars and X-warriors. But when we are dependent on the platforms in order to create, can we call such production art anymore Are we producers or users Or perhaps just the used. In a series of studies on who owns a LolCats. The relationship between selfies and autofiction. The new commons of wiki,. Whether the look of the online world is old or new, or just a poor image. Whether you can copyright a loop. Why AI art without an artist is not art.

In this brilliant philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh looks at the key moments of our recent digital lives in order to understand how the aesthetics of the internet were formed.

'Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers' Deborah Levy

'Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery... boldly intellectual work.' Financial Times

Reviews

Bubbling over with pithy and accessible aperus, Amateurs! is a snappy guide to the new aesthetics of online culture and the end of professionalization. Walsh surveys the deskilling that results from the fusion of unpaid labour and self-branding: from dumb memes to Instagram influencers, from Wikicore aesthetics to the trash essay, culminating in the talent bypass that is AI. She offers catchy terms for thinking through the revision of authorship and creativity (decuperation and unrealism, anyone) - delivered with a keen sense of history and a spiky feminist attitude and that never lapses into the curmudgeonly.' -- Claire Bishop, author of Disordered Attention
Joanna Walsh finds exactly the right concept (if also, as she notes, a paradoxically retro as well as definitionally mimetic one, on the cusp of becoming indistinguishable from its historical opposite) for totalizing that seemingly untotalizable, endlessly self-dehistoricizing thing which is the Internet as aesthetic phenomenon. This is a stunning feat. -- Sianne Ngai, George M. Pullman Professor of English and the College, University of Chicago
A bold, thoughtful and beautifully lyrical exploration of how amateur creativity shaped the internet -- Rachel ODwyer, author of Tokens
Amateurs! makes the case that platforms inviting us to create art as a means of communications became traps. Arguing that internet amateurism is "an aesthetic revolution as big as modernism," Walsh traces both how it allows for greater activism and solidarity, while also creating the conditions for exploitation: AI resource guzzling, alt-right brain rot, and the brutal inequities of neoliberal economic extraction. * Lit Hubs Most Anticipated Books of 2025 *

Author Bio

Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End and Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers and currently runs @noentry_arts.