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

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The story of how you created internet culture and why it matters Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as ‘meatspace’ job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we’re creating online, it isn’t amateur anymore. But is it art?In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence. What People Are Saying "Bubbling over with pithy and accessible aperçus, 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 O’Dwyer, 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 Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025 "From the author of Girl Online, a new manifesto building on the hyperdeveloped internet society of the twenty-first century. Amateurs builds on Time magazine’s 2006 assertion that ‘you’ are the person of the year — the stragglers and marginalized communities that ultimately build the internet’s biggest trends and rhythms." OurCulture, Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2025 "Joanna Walsh, whose blend of savagely astute analytical thinking and quality narrative chops never fails to enlighten, inform and provoke, whatever her choice of subject may be." Stu Hennigan, The Bookseller Show more