Joanna Walsh‘s Amateurs!: How We Built the Internet and Why It Matters was recently published by Verso Books. In it, Walsh charts the ascendancy of a new kind of digital creative, one who muddies the divide between professional and non-professional artistic practices. Moving from the early days of the web through the rise and demise of Twitter, Walsh narrates how new access to connectivity has changed the way we approach, define, and create art. I spoke with her via email about the history of the net, the rise of the figure of the amateur, and what might come next as digital platforms continue to evolve.
In the title of your book, Amateurs!, the presence an exclamation mark would seem to render the phrase interjectional, something in the line of an insult hurled by a member of the initiated at an inspiring group of laypeople. Was this deliberate, and should the reader get the sense that you are calling them an amateur?
I wanted to evoke the double sense of the word—as an insult about a lack of professionalism, of proficiency, an inefficiency (all of which are exciting loci of refusal and resistance but also of exploitation: amateur as in unpaid and often unacknowledged) and also the sense in which thinkers of the late twentieth century—Lefebvre, de Certeau—used it: as the definition of respite from, but also a binary complement to, paid work. In French ‘amateur’ is ‘a lover of’—someone whose relation to their area of enthusiasm is via love rather than a professional relation defined by qualifications or pay.
(I also wanted the title to be Amateurs!!!1, as in the internet usage that shows the typist was so enthusiastic that they kept on typing ! even after they took their finger off the shift key but, sadly, this was vetoed…)
I talk a lot in the book about criticism (as in literary/cultural) as a practice with an amateur history, but I hadn’t thought of amateur readership. I guess readers are always amateur because of the positioning of reading as a leisure activity, which means reading will always retain radical potential.
Amateurs opens with an account of a “meatspace” encounter with mutuals you had first connected with online: the 2024 Minor Incident in Paris. In your opinion, what was lost and what was gained by removing the veil of partial anonymity, as well as the layers of artifice, that the web tends to afford? Do you think that such in-person encounters might ever reemerge as a viable alternative for the communities and exchanges that the web once facilitated?
It’s nice that you put it this way round: the usual question is whether virtual encounters can in any way match up to those had offline. As a writer I’ve always been excited by interactions via words. Maybe I’m one of the few people who likes internet dating. The web is increasingly un-anonymous. The demand for verified profiles ties our online to meatspace identities. While this allows sites to trace users in case of violations (though when did we appoint platforms as our undemocratic police?) it dismantles a valuable feature of the early web: the ability to step outside the boundaries of offline gender, class, racial categories and appear as pure language or, as of course some platforms are not textual, representation—pure art.
The demand for verified profiles…dismantles a valuable feature of the early web: the ability to step outside the boundaries of offline gender, class, racial categories and appear as pure language or, as of course some platforms are not textual, representation—pure art.
On page 11 of Amateurs, you write, “Is it any surprise that the figure of the amateur resurfaces on the late capitalist aesthetic internet, in an era of the aggressive defunding of state education, particularly in the arts and humanities?” Can you speculate as to whether a well-funded state education apparatus in the arts and humanities might have diminished the rise of the amateur online? Do you hold out any expectation that a clear line of demarcation of professionalization and amateurism might reemerge from a well-funded education system, or have we irreparably fractured that paradigm?
I don’t think that well-funded arts education would diminish amateur online practice; only that a lack of funding and access offline often makes it the only viable option. I’d hope that that state support would enhance and enable internet arts. Given better (or any) funding, ambitious pro-bono projects, like the online litmag that’s hosting us here, or 3AM Magazine (where I was an editor from 2014-18) could be supported financially so that the editors could put more time aside for their work, or so that they could pay themselves or their contributors.
On page 12, you write, “the performance of surplus-enjoyment (liking, upvoting, smiling for the selfie) is necessary to gain surplus-enjoyment as a reward, the dopamine hit of liking and being liked that keeps us scrolling. Which kind of explains why everyone hates the internet but keeps on coming back for more.” What happens to the performance of surplus-enjoyment when the reward—the dopamine hit—disappears, but the act of scrolling remains?
Everyone’s still scrolling on diminishing returns, knowing that they’re under pressure to get likes to retain the visibility that underlies the chance of connection, knowing that an increasing amount of their likes are from bots, and knowing that the platforms have, as Cory Doctorow wrote, ‘enshittfied’ the algorithm, so that users are rewarded randomly for their output, then not at all. Most people are still scrolling because there’s nowhere else to go: rather than lose touch with their friends, family, audiences, work networks, until better platforms emerge as alternatives, they stay.
Most people are still scrolling because there’s nowhere else to go: rather than lose touch with their friends, family, audiences, work networks, until better platforms emerge as alternatives, they stay.
On page 20 of Amateurs, you attribute the mainstream recognition of “boring” works like Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to the blurring of the boundaries between professional and amateur aesthetics online. Do you think that there is something cynical about this recognition, that it speaks more to the desire to blur the afore-mentioned boundaries and challenge the primacy of professional aesthetics than it does to genuine enjoyment or appreciation of a film like Jeanne Dielman?
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here. Is it that I’m cynically using Akerman’s ‘professional’ film to manufacture a ‘blurring’ of professional works (including Akerman’s own film) and amateur productions, to support my own arguments? Or is it that the ‘mainstream recognition’ of the film has been cynical? Let’s go with the second interpretation. But if we do, are we we understand that the establishment that has accorded recognition to Ackerman’s film in order to blur the boundaries between professional and amateur practice. If we’re going to go further down this branch of the algorithm, then we have to ask why. We could say that there are both gatekeepers and gate-breakers in a range of different mainstream arts establishments. The ‘mainstream’ is not one set of people. It may be in the interest of many mainstream platform owners to blur the boundaries between professional and amateur creative practice in order to continue to make money from the creative work of users while keeping them in the amateur zone so as not to accord them pay or credit. However it’s in the interest of parts of the ‘mainstream’ art establishment to maintain the value of the work they promote, by not allowing amateur unmonetized, often anonymous practice to be described as art.
I honestly don’t care whether art like Jeanne Dielman is made available to people ‘cynically’ or not. The more people are allowed the opportunity to enjoy Jeanne Dielman, whether this enjoyment is ‘genuine’ or not (and I don’t really believe there is a non-genuine reaction to anything aesthetic, see my chapter on AI art), the better. Equally the more people who are allowed to see it and reject it as ‘boring’, the better too. Both are ‘genuine’ reactions requiring engagement.
On page 20, you write that aesthetics has classically depended on the possibility of critical evaluation. Aesthetic judgement constrains art. The internet blurs the mythic division between aesthetics and art, and this ‘blurring’ offers radical hope. Is the radical hope that the internet offers the attainment of the status of artist without needing to climb traditional ladders or negotiate traditional channels, or is the radical hope that the internet offers the attainment of the status of artist without needing undertake the labor-intensive process of creating art?
The radical hope offered is about access to the arts. I don’t think it’s about attainment and status. Traditional structures are not always naturally ‘labour intensive’ and internet creative productions are often far from being effort free. There are amateur net practitioners who put work in, and attain status, and who put work in but don’t attain the status, not to mention those who make work without much effort but don’t attain status either. All these are very normal trajectories and outcomes for people who make creative work. There are also artists who have navigated traditional art structures with—or without much—effort, and who have variously ‘succeeded’ or ‘failed’ to attain status within it.
When access to arts practice is expanded at scale, the nature of the practice changes. In the case of the net it doesn’t only allow ‘amateurs’ who make things online to reach ‘professional’ status’. Sometimes their aim is entirely different: to make something with other people that—though it intervenes in aesthetics—doesn’t aspire to call itself art; to build and engage in relationships within a community; to create, develop and détourne forms, sometimes just for the hell of it. All these things change what it is to create, participate in and be the audience for, aesthetic work. It changes them for traditional artist and art world, but also for audiences who don’t think of themselves as engaged audiences of either offline or internet art. Because it develops aesthetics and creative processes that change how we see, tell and record things.
On page 200 you write of the moment of Twitter’s death, “What used to be a performative communication network has become a network of performative non-communication.” Do you believe that another platform might ever successfully replicate the “old Twitter” as a performative communication network or is performative non-communication the new modus operandi for social media users?
We have Bsky and Mastadon… their reach isn’t great though Bsky’s is improving. Setting up a site on networks like IndieWeb requires a bit of time and know-how. The delight of platforms, when they worked better for users, is that only a minimum of technical knowledge was necessary for people who wanted presence, creativity and interaction, but whose technical skills lay elsewhere. It’s also difficult—or perhaps impossible— to replicate that long moment when most people who are now internet users were going online for the first time and finding what they could do there.
If we’re to build on this era, its vital not to turn away from the internet, however dispiriting its degradation into a more commercial and policed space.
In the wake of Twitter’s death (and burial), how are we to view the boom of amateurism that it facilitated? A genuine movement stymied, driven underground, destined to regroup on some future platform or in some different form? A moment of false hope for self-expression that was ultimately chimerical, offering false promises unrealized? Are there any places where your see the “radical hope” of “old” Twitter re-emerging?
It wasn’t false hope. At its best it was around 20 years of people making works that altered the way art was made, who had access to make it, and the way it circulated and was received; works that changed the ways we see the world. That’s no mean feat. In fact it’s unprecedented. I wrote the book because I want what was achieved to be celebrated as world-changing (if often deeply compromised) critical and creative practice. If we’re to build on this era, its vital not to turn away from the internet, however dispiriting its degradation into a more commercial and policed space. As one of my favourite tweets of all time put it, “Imagine bragging because you had to walk 6 days to the village librarium and consult the scroll of Nebuchadnezzar just to check how many wives Henry VIII had. I’m good luv, enjoy x”.
Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters is now available from Verso Books.
Joanna Walsh 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 in Ireland, the 2017 UK Arts Foundation fellow for literature; the Anthony Burgess Centenary Writer Fellow at the University of Manchester in 2017 and the 2024 DAAD Artists in Berlin awardee for literature (refused in solidarity with Palestine).
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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