Overview

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

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9781839765391

Table of Contents

Reviews

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 <i>Disordered Attention</i>

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 <i>Disordered Attention</i> 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

"Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers -- Deborah Levy This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. -- Anne Boyer, author of The Undying, (praise for for <i>Girl Online</i>) Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn't miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is ""good to think"" with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era -- Lauren Elkin, author of <i>Art Monsters</i>, (praise for for <i>Girl Online</i>) In a series of meditations and 'thought experiments' exploring motherhood, blogs, women's writing, and the meaning of work both on and off the screen, Walsh examines the relationship between looking and being looked at, watching and being watched, that is inherent to both the internet and femininity -- (praise for for <i>Girl Online</i>) * Paris Review * Walsh's writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery... boldly intellectual work -- (praise for for <i>Girl Online</i>) * Financial Times *"

Author Information

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.

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