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

by Joanna Walsh

How to overcome the internet

As platforms constantly expect us to update and post, our status as 'artists' is often overlooked. The internet has become a world of appearances where aesthetics trumps ethics - it is more important to gain likes than to be right. Power and punishment are enacted via aesthetic judgements.

With a light touch, On Screens asks serious questions about—and posits creative strategies in response to—this capitalised internet. Walsh, in particular, pays attention to the ‘minor’, often ‘feminised’, online affects—the like/heart/star of social media, the rage in outrage, celebrity envy, insta-influencing— that have such fundamental effects on our identities, our politics, our desires offline.

Through a series of scintillating essays that ask -  what is a mother online? how has the contract between the author and their work changed? The dangers of the 'cute' personality, how people prepare for their death online; Walsh shows that the aesthetics that keep us tethered to the internet are also the means by which we can subvert or even take it over.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Psychology, Art, Sociology

304 pages, Paperback

Published September 23, 2025

About the author

JOANNA WALSH is a British writer. Her work has appeared in Granta Magazine, gorse journal, The Stinging Fly, and many others and has been anthologized in Dalkey's Best European Fiction 2015, Best British Short Stories 2014 and 2015, and elsewhere. Vertigo and Hotel were published internationally in 2015. Fractals, was published in the UK in 2013, and Hotel was published internationally in 2015. She writes literary and cultural criticism for The Guardian, The New Statesman, and others, is edits at 3:am Magazine, and Catapult, and created and runs the Twitter hashtag #readwomen, heralded by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers.”

Reviews

[Kaleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what we call all killer no filler. Just bars on bars on bars. The kind of essay collection about the internet I’m always craving and wanting and seeking. Finally!

We got Mark Fisher, memes, Bourdieu, the internet’s blurred lines between job and life, Marcuse, gamification, Lacan, AI art, Benjamin, cursed images, Foucault, autofiction, Ranciere, core aesthetics, Kant, the personal essay, Derrida, etc etc etc.

There is so much to chew on here, it’s really like a capsule of the social internet with theory to help make sense of the chaos. I highly recommend this if you're interested in critical culture studies or if you just really love/hate the internet ♡

Thank you to Verso and NetGalley for the e-arc, I will be purchasing the physical book upon release.

[Kuu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This book somehow manages to hit the perfect spot between very popular science and yet full of references to (primarily) philosophers that are not explained and that the reader is expected to already be familiar with (Kant, Derrida, Marcuse, Schopenhauer...), making it both incomprehensibly difficult and underwhelmingly unscientific at the same time. That's... a feat. And a shame, because I was excited about this book and what it says about the internet and the culture of amateurs, but sadly, the way in which this was written made my eyes just kind of skim over most of the information. You can really tell this isn't a scientific text, because barely any of the concepts and definitions are defined or explained, instead assuming a reader who is familiar not only with the sources but also with the specific way the author interprets these sources. It's really quite sad because the premise was very interesting.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Verso for the advanced copy

I have no idea how to describe this book, in my personal database I tagged it with politics, sociology, philosophy and tech, which should tell you everything.

This is the kind of book I absolutely love, the kind that gives me a lot to think about. I’ve been spiralling in my own brain thinking about the fact that once upon a time we used the internet as amateurs, for fun, without expecting anything in return ; but now most people on social media are hoping to “make it” somehow, to become a full time content creator, to make money out of it. And I think I already knew that but never really thought about what it meant for us a as a society. This quote says it way better than I could

“The proletarians of the screen  – the influencer/tweeter/ TikToker  – make aesthetic content for their platforms via a means of production they do not own, and the platform owners recoup the economic surplus-value, but the whole process runs on another, less recuperable surplus: the consumers’ and the makers’ surplus-enjoyment, which hides the labour in this process. Online, what looks like leisure is now work.”

That’s something I’ve been thinking about too, the fact that people are building careers using platforms they have no control over, remember the Tiktok ban and the way American users freaked out?

There’s a bit of travelling through internet’s history, and if like me you’re an older millennial it’s really fun (I did have a live journal account, and a tumblr) and a lot of quoting french philosophers which I loved (I’m french and I do love to do philosophy for free as a hobby).

[Ioana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was nothing like I expected. I don't know why I thought this would be a happy-go lucky kind of easy book, talking about memes and the golden age of the internet.

It does speak about that sunny era when Twitter was Twitter and we connected with fellow amateurs and our data was not being used for training AIs. This is a cultural critique of the ways of the Internet, how it changed and that very specific moment when people who loved some subjects connected with likeminded folks and built the face of the this virtual space.

While this didn't feel like an easy read it shone a light on a lot of matters I didn't think about. From the immense amount of work we do by creating content, unrecognized work, the never ending discussion of what is art in the age of online presence and how marginalized voices and identities find their place, this is a thought provoking book that I am grateful to have received.

As an amateur myself, I really appreciate the celebration of this position and the analyses the autor wrote, to bring into attention something so specific, that has impacted many of our lives.

[Emi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Publishing date: 23.09.2025 (DD/MM/YYYY)
Thank you to NetGalley and Verso Books for the ARC. My opinions are my own.

Amateurs has a theme that I really enjoy. However, I find myself disappointed.

The book is fast paced and a little messy. Some of the sections feel disconnected and underexplored. Writing itself is a little shallow, and some of these takes feel ... odd.

There is a certain section of this book exploring AI, and I felt like it could be boiled down to "Fun!". What an odd take for an author to make. As an artist myself, AI has to be approached in a more nuanced way. Especially now in its infant stage. The earlier we place the rules, the better for all participants and even victims. I would enjoy this section more if it explored the negative aspects of AI too and not just generative AI and what you can do with it.

Overall, this book should have been for me, bu the writing is too shallow, the sections feel messy, but the sources are great. Points for sources, everything else needs more time in the oven.

Giving this 2 stars.

[Zachary Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literary explorations concerning the internet? With a philosophical bent? I’m but a simple man.

This fascinating book tells the history of the internet not through the eyes of the technologists, the policymakers, or even the users, but the amateurs. The netizens, as we were once called.

We made things on the web for the love of it. Then creativity became the price of digital existence.

I’d never really considered the internet’s duality of being both liberation and exploitation until reading this book. Her writing mirrors the web itself: high theory meets LOLcats, philosophy threads through memes, serious analysis delivered with a wry understanding of online culture.

Read this if you've ever wondered what we lost when amateur stopped meaning ‘for love.’

I received an early copy courtesy of the publishers via Netgalley. All opinions are mine alone.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately the marriage of philosophy and the internet was unsuccessful for me. Chapters were stuffed with literature and seemingly unrelated to the theme of the 'amateur,' which was pretty loose to begin with — some were barely readable. I feel like a lot of thinkers overanalyze the internet and turn it into something it isn't — when you're praising the LOLcat as a worker's micro-rebellion against their capitalist boss, it might be time to wonder if what you're saying makes any sense.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really more of an aesthetic assessment of various internet cultures than a "history" (which is maybe something closer to _Meme Wars_), but still a rousing tribute to the amateur artistry of the internet.

[Billypal · Rating 5 out of 5]

@Spoons_on_the_ground is happy

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Verso for the ARC of this title.

I've enjoyed Walsh's previous work, and was interested in the logline of the book here, but found this largely hit-or-miss. There are some absolute banger essays in here, but equally as many that are fully up their own academic ass, and the book is more fun when it's not stretching to try and connect itself to philosophy.