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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.
Reviews
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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.'
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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.
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A bold, thoughtful and beautifully lyrical exploration of how amateur creativity shaped the internet