“Is that me?” (2009) | Jimmie Quick / CC BY 2.0
Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, starting from the moment we choose a username. And now that we spend more and more of our lives online, making such art is, for many people, nearly unavoidable. So what does it mean, both for the internet and for art in general, that our lives are experienced through perfunctory, amateur acts of creation? And as critic-theorist-artist Joanna Walsh asks, if we’re forced to create it, can our online art still set us, the “proletarians of the screen,” free?
Walsh’s latest book, Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters (Verso, 2025), is equal parts ode to net art and critical analysis of its present-day capitalist underpinnings. Her book offers a tasting menu of internet creativity—from LOLcats to vaporwave to Aesthetics Wiki—and its mashup of mimicry, kitsch, spectatorship, triviality, and transcription, all while maintaining an eye on the labor that produces such intersections.
Working in chapters divided by year and accompanying online moments, Walsh—an author and artist whose last book, Girl Online, explored her experience as a woman on the internet through a critical theory lens—guides us from the excitement over Web 2.0 in 2004 to 2023’s uncanny DALL-E (self?) portraits. Contemporary cultural critics like Sianne Ngai (theorist of the postmodern aesthetic categories “zany,” “cute,” and “interesting”) and Claire Bishop (champion of “aesthetic antagonism”) feature prominently in Walsh’s analysis, sharing space comfortably with twentieth-century theorists like Walter Benjamin.
Crucial to Walsh’s argument—that “creativity became the price of digital existence”—is her account of the experience of being online. The author speculates variously on the world wide web as a Fluxus-worthy “happening,” as a kind of music or sound art, and as the new medium for interrogating the nature of time, like performance and video art before it. In describing William Basinski’s 2002 looping audio transcription of disintegrating cassettes that he later set to home video of the burning Twin Towers and published on YouTube, Walsh writes that it is through warping temporality that Basinski’s project successfully pushes back on the “crisis” of political representation online: “A crisis in representation may be better addressed by art than analysis … [Basinski’s project] is not an emergency brake. It looks neither forward nor back in time. It loops.”
Walsh’s own prose—with its frequent detours and “hyperlinked” free associations—mimics the sense of infinite layering she describes on the internet. She ends a complex section on accelerationism with a wrenching detour into a fractal-like set of metaphors and references:
If it speaks of anything, it’s the present; or rather, it absolutely nails the era of its origin with a powerful post-Thatcherite dystopian grunge aesthetic, as expressed in the hyper-cities of ‘Judge Dredd’, the long-running 2000 A.D. strip concurrent with Land’s involvement with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in the 1990s.
Impossible (for me, at least) to take in all at once, this passage reads as a rupture in time, forcing the reader to pause and Google, or else attempt to eke out a vague impression of Walsh’s expansive intended meaning.
Read in this way, the entire book can be considered an art object itself, an attempt to capture the unique splintering, durational nature of the internet via “the legacy medium of print.” Amateurs! is Walsh’s “in memoriam” for an internet that no longer exists. The net as we now know it is a place that prefers to extract as much as it can from users in order to sell their creations back to them, as in the case of generative AI. Image-creation platforms like DALL-E do not add but remix, resulting in something that Walsh dubs “not art but culture.”
Recognizing the constant creativity that still makes the internet a pleasure helps Walsh pinpoint what’s so sad about its increasingly obligatory quality. When online creation becomes perfunctory, what is lost is not its status as art but an internet that is open to creation without skill or even purpose—amateurism, in a word. Bemoaning post-Musk Twitter, Walsh writes, “It’s exactly like being offline where who gets heard and whose work gets seen so often depends on who already has contacts, context or money. Creativity won’t get you anywhere anymore.”
But the fact that Walsh’s beloved web is ephemeral, temporary, and spontaneous also protects its artistic integrity. “Online space doesn’t work like meatspace,” Walsh writes, “It is not something that exists outside us: it is created, expanded and defined by live aesthetic practice.” The more they attempt to flatten, predict, and resell its art, the closer tech companies are to owning a knockoff version of the internet—cheap, but somehow very expensive.
