The story of how you created internet culture and why it matters

Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.

What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as ‘meatspace’ job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we’re creating online, it isn’t amateur anymore. But is it art?

In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.

"Walsh’s Amateurs! catalogues how our online creative efforts have created and discarded garish styles — and how everyone wants to profit off of them...[Amateurs! is] dizzying in scope, perceptive even when it gets caught up in nonsense, swerving rapidly from Fredric Jameson to KnowYourMeme.com. " Ethan Beck, The Washington Post

"Amateurs! is a eulogy and a manifesto for the internet revolution that came and went before our eyes, on our screens, beneath our fingertips: the revolution of the amateur." Helena Aeberli, Los Angeles Review of Books