‘Some of what we did became a thing'
Joanna Walsh, Amateurs! How We Built the Internet and Why It Matters
Verso, 272pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781839765391
reviewed by Christopher Webb
If you’re reading this, then no doubt you’ve heard the news by now: the internet is cooked.
Right now, it’s difficult to know how — or indeed if — the web will ever recover from the many skirmishes it’s fighting on various fronts (the ramping up of government regulation in certain states, the “enshittification” of private platforms and, perhaps most significantly, the attempts by the AI labs to divert all traffic away from traditional publishers and websites and towards their new platforms). How did we get here? How did a medium that once promised to democratise creativity morph into a machine for extracting value from it? Joanna Walsh’s eccentric and very timely new study offers a response to these questions by focusing on a highly visible yet rarely theorised figure: the creative amateur.
Amateurs! How We Built the Internet and Why It Matters is a proudly ‘patchy’, internet-slang-filled, ‘para-academic’ work, and one that begins with a familiar narrative: the internet’s creators and builders — those who built its culture without expectation of payment or professional status — have been systematically harvested as their creative labour was transformed into the raw material for platform capitalism. What began as a genuinely participatory medium, sustained by what Walsh calls ‘the radical we’ of amateur solidarity, has since become an extractive device, mining human creativity for corporate profit while ultimately leaving creators isolated and competing for algorithmic visibility.
Versions of this story have been rehearsed across the political spectrum, of course. The common enemy here is the monopoly of Big Tech. On the one hand, there are those critics on the left, like Cory Doctorow, who in his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, laments this progression of events but sees it as an inevitable consequence of an increasingly privatised internet, which leads to the emptying out and slow decay of big social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On the other, there are those like Chris Dixon, whose 2024 book Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet blames a lack of healthy competition in the market (it should come as no surprise that Dixon is a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz). Whether you prefer a lesser dose of capitalism or a bigger dose of capitalism is, in some ways, a moot point. Big Tech === bad. And it’s particularly bad for the health of the internet.
What makes Walsh’s study so refreshing and so compelling, in contrast to these other books, is her choice of lens and, specifically, the tight focus on the amateur as a distinct and often overlooked cultural worker. Walsh claims that this figure has been so quietly influential, in fact, that they would go onto provide the building blocks of a new kind of public sphere and go on to shape our very relationship with work. ‘If the internet has amateurised professionalism’ (i.e. by threatening to replace us and our specialised forms of knowledge), she writes, ‘it has also professionalised amateurism’ (we’re all now ‘game modders, instapoets, clicktivists, we make Facebook family albums, we create new worlds; some of us have Second Lives’). And ‘if amateurism has become strangely professionalised’, she goes on, ‘then professional arts organisations — publishers, filmmakers, galleries — have started using vocabularies and styles learnt from amateurs online. What we did in these amateur spaces began to matter. Some of what we did became a thing, an aesthetic.’ We’ve been told, she says, that ‘we’re “only amateurs”; that we’re “users”, as in “not producers”; “users”, as in helpless addicts.’ But, crucially, we ‘have more power than we have been told’.
The seemingly peculiar structure of Amateurs! — in which, each chapter addresses, in no particular order, a year between 2001 and 2025 — mirrors the internet’s own flattened temporal logic, where past and future collapse into the eternal present of a continuous, looping feed. The study begins in 2004 with the emergence of social media platforms that promised to give everyone a voice and ends in 2025 contemplating whether ‘Resistance Is Useless’ in the face of platform capitalism’s total capture of amateur creativity, as Walsh chronicles Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Between these bookends, she traces, amongst other phenomena, the rise and fall of a particular kind of digital optimism, one that believed the internet might offer genuine alternatives to traditional gatekeepers of cultural production (publishing houses, galleries, record labels, etc.).
However, Walsh’s argument sometimes suffers from its own eclecticism. The book’s structure can at times feel arbitrary, and her theoretical touchstones don’t always cohere to support her point, some of which lean very heavily on critics she clearly admires (Sianne Ngai, in particular). But more problematically, her definition of ‘amateur’ remains slippery throughout. Are Reddit moderators who perform $3.4 million worth of unpaid labour annually really amateurs in the same sense as someone posting LOLcat memes on their lunch break in 2007? And where do OnlyFans content-creators fit into all this? The book could, at times, benefit from a more rigorous taxonomy of online creative labour.
The book is fun, though: fun to revisit the beginnings of Tumblr, fun to be reminded of flash-in-the-pan memes and micro-genres; and at times it becomes a moving tribute to how we remember and memorialise the internet. ‘The amateur internet is beginning to look less of a movement than a moment,’ she writes, before quoting a Bluesky thread that nostalgically nominates 2007–2013 as the best era, ‘before there were Only Five Possible Websites.’ The point isn’t only elegiac. Walsh links enclosure (Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr; later consolidations) to a more general loss of ‘places to go,’ especially for non-technical makers who rely on ready-made platforms to make anything at all.
Amateurs! arrives at a moment when these questions feel particularly urgent. As AI systems become more sophisticated and pervasive, we need frameworks for understanding what we might lose if human creativity becomes fully automated. Walsh’s book reminds us that behind every algorithm is a vast archive of human labour and creativity, and that the struggle over who controls those archives will determine what the next iteration of the internet looks like.
Yet Walsh’s most valuable insight goes deeper: amateur online creativity represents a new form of aesthetic and political practice that challenges traditional hierarchies of art, labour, and value. Operating on principles of love, attention, and community rather than profit, amateur work suggests alternative economies of value that we’ve barely begun to recognise. Walsh argues we’re living through a cultural revolution comparable to past avant-garde movements — but one that goes largely unrecognised because it’s amateur, online, and often feminine-coded.
If the age of the amateur is ending, as she suggests, then Amateurs! serves as both obituary and call to arms, documenting what was, while insisting we recognise and remember the revolutionary potential of what we’ve built together — even as we slide towards a new unknown.
Right now, it’s difficult to know how — or indeed if — the web will ever recover from the many skirmishes it’s fighting on various fronts (the ramping up of government regulation in certain states, the “enshittification” of private platforms and, perhaps most significantly, the attempts by the AI labs to divert all traffic away from traditional publishers and websites and towards their new platforms). How did we get here? How did a medium that once promised to democratise creativity morph into a machine for extracting value from it? Joanna Walsh’s eccentric and very timely new study offers a response to these questions by focusing on a highly visible yet rarely theorised figure: the creative amateur.
Amateurs! How We Built the Internet and Why It Matters is a proudly ‘patchy’, internet-slang-filled, ‘para-academic’ work, and one that begins with a familiar narrative: the internet’s creators and builders — those who built its culture without expectation of payment or professional status — have been systematically harvested as their creative labour was transformed into the raw material for platform capitalism. What began as a genuinely participatory medium, sustained by what Walsh calls ‘the radical we’ of amateur solidarity, has since become an extractive device, mining human creativity for corporate profit while ultimately leaving creators isolated and competing for algorithmic visibility.
Versions of this story have been rehearsed across the political spectrum, of course. The common enemy here is the monopoly of Big Tech. On the one hand, there are those critics on the left, like Cory Doctorow, who in his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, laments this progression of events but sees it as an inevitable consequence of an increasingly privatised internet, which leads to the emptying out and slow decay of big social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On the other, there are those like Chris Dixon, whose 2024 book Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet blames a lack of healthy competition in the market (it should come as no surprise that Dixon is a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz). Whether you prefer a lesser dose of capitalism or a bigger dose of capitalism is, in some ways, a moot point. Big Tech === bad. And it’s particularly bad for the health of the internet.
What makes Walsh’s study so refreshing and so compelling, in contrast to these other books, is her choice of lens and, specifically, the tight focus on the amateur as a distinct and often overlooked cultural worker. Walsh claims that this figure has been so quietly influential, in fact, that they would go onto provide the building blocks of a new kind of public sphere and go on to shape our very relationship with work. ‘If the internet has amateurised professionalism’ (i.e. by threatening to replace us and our specialised forms of knowledge), she writes, ‘it has also professionalised amateurism’ (we’re all now ‘game modders, instapoets, clicktivists, we make Facebook family albums, we create new worlds; some of us have Second Lives’). And ‘if amateurism has become strangely professionalised’, she goes on, ‘then professional arts organisations — publishers, filmmakers, galleries — have started using vocabularies and styles learnt from amateurs online. What we did in these amateur spaces began to matter. Some of what we did became a thing, an aesthetic.’ We’ve been told, she says, that ‘we’re “only amateurs”; that we’re “users”, as in “not producers”; “users”, as in helpless addicts.’ But, crucially, we ‘have more power than we have been told’.
The seemingly peculiar structure of Amateurs! — in which, each chapter addresses, in no particular order, a year between 2001 and 2025 — mirrors the internet’s own flattened temporal logic, where past and future collapse into the eternal present of a continuous, looping feed. The study begins in 2004 with the emergence of social media platforms that promised to give everyone a voice and ends in 2025 contemplating whether ‘Resistance Is Useless’ in the face of platform capitalism’s total capture of amateur creativity, as Walsh chronicles Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Between these bookends, she traces, amongst other phenomena, the rise and fall of a particular kind of digital optimism, one that believed the internet might offer genuine alternatives to traditional gatekeepers of cultural production (publishing houses, galleries, record labels, etc.).
However, Walsh’s argument sometimes suffers from its own eclecticism. The book’s structure can at times feel arbitrary, and her theoretical touchstones don’t always cohere to support her point, some of which lean very heavily on critics she clearly admires (Sianne Ngai, in particular). But more problematically, her definition of ‘amateur’ remains slippery throughout. Are Reddit moderators who perform $3.4 million worth of unpaid labour annually really amateurs in the same sense as someone posting LOLcat memes on their lunch break in 2007? And where do OnlyFans content-creators fit into all this? The book could, at times, benefit from a more rigorous taxonomy of online creative labour.
The book is fun, though: fun to revisit the beginnings of Tumblr, fun to be reminded of flash-in-the-pan memes and micro-genres; and at times it becomes a moving tribute to how we remember and memorialise the internet. ‘The amateur internet is beginning to look less of a movement than a moment,’ she writes, before quoting a Bluesky thread that nostalgically nominates 2007–2013 as the best era, ‘before there were Only Five Possible Websites.’ The point isn’t only elegiac. Walsh links enclosure (Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr; later consolidations) to a more general loss of ‘places to go,’ especially for non-technical makers who rely on ready-made platforms to make anything at all.
Amateurs! arrives at a moment when these questions feel particularly urgent. As AI systems become more sophisticated and pervasive, we need frameworks for understanding what we might lose if human creativity becomes fully automated. Walsh’s book reminds us that behind every algorithm is a vast archive of human labour and creativity, and that the struggle over who controls those archives will determine what the next iteration of the internet looks like.
Yet Walsh’s most valuable insight goes deeper: amateur online creativity represents a new form of aesthetic and political practice that challenges traditional hierarchies of art, labour, and value. Operating on principles of love, attention, and community rather than profit, amateur work suggests alternative economies of value that we’ve barely begun to recognise. Walsh argues we’re living through a cultural revolution comparable to past avant-garde movements — but one that goes largely unrecognised because it’s amateur, online, and often feminine-coded.
If the age of the amateur is ending, as she suggests, then Amateurs! serves as both obituary and call to arms, documenting what was, while insisting we recognise and remember the revolutionary potential of what we’ve built together — even as we slide towards a new unknown.