Amateurs! (How Users Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters)

A Radical History of the Internet as a place of creativity: where aesthetics has become a currency and the cost is being online.

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

This book title, Amateurs! (How Users Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters), ISBN: 9781839765391, by Joanna Walsh, published by Verso Books (September 9, 2025) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.

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