Amateurs!

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

About the Author

Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of twelve books (several co-written with DIY AIs that she coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie.

Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, BETA Festival Dublin, and Sample Studios Cork. She founded and directed the online activist projects @read_women (2014-18), and @noentry_arts (2019_2024). She was the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature, the 2017 UK Arts Foundation fellow for literature; an Anthony Burgess Centenary Writer Fellow at the University of Manchester and a 2024 DAAD Artists in Berlin awardee (refused in solidarity with the Palestine).