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

Amateurs! is like the internet in its juxtaposition of the high (as in high theory) and the low (as in LOLcats). Sometimes this evokes the textual tension of a meme, an enjoyable friction between content and form, the zeugmatic yoking of disparate terms as in the Google-search-derived flarf poetry that flourished in the 2000s, the free association of a blog, the discord of a social media feed, ideas “hyperlinked” together, the self-conscious lack of rigor made into its own methodology."

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.'

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.

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

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.

From the author of <i>Girl Online</i>, 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.

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.

An insightful exploration...[Walsh's] amateurs were liable to use the word aesthetic with particular pleasure and self-consciousness. She celebrates the aesthetic they created, and mourns it, and celebrates it again.