Amateurs!

“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

“[Walsh’s] interpretations are fresh and insightful, like when she pinpoints Tumblr users’ love of “cursed images” of red-eyed people and animals—a common effect in amateur flash photography—as evincing a “nostalgia for the failed.”
—Publishers Weekly

“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

“Amateurs! is like the internet in its juxtaposition of the high (as in high theory) and the low (as in LOLcats). Sometimes this evokes the textual tension of a meme, an enjoyable friction between content and form, the zeugmatic yoking of disparate terms as in the Google-search-derived flarf poetry that flourished in the 2000s, the free association of a blog, the discord of a social media feed, ideas “hyperlinked” together, the self-conscious lack of rigor made into its own methodology.””
—Katie Kadue, Bookforum

“Bubbling over with pithy and accessible aperçus, Amateurs! is a snappy guide to the new aesthetics of online culture and the end of professionalization. Walsh surveys the deskilling that results from the fusion of unpaid labour and self-branding: from dumb memes to Instagram influencers, from Wikicore aesthetics to the trash essay, culminating in the talent bypass that is AI. She offers catchy terms for thinking through the revision of authorship and creativity (decuperation and unrealism, anyone?) – delivered with a keen sense of history and a spiky feminist attitude and that never lapses into the curmudgeonly.'”
—Claire Bishop, author of Disordered Attention

“Joanna Walsh finds exactly the right concept (if also, as she notes, a paradoxically retro as well as definitionally mimetic one, on the cusp of becoming indistinguishable from its historical opposite) for totalizing that seemingly untotalizable, endlessly self-dehistoricizing thing which is the Internet as aesthetic phenomenon. This is a stunning feat.”
—Sianne Ngai, George M. Pullman Professor of English and the College, University of Chicago

“A bold, thoughtful and beautifully lyrical exploration of how amateur creativity shaped the internet”
—Rachel O’Dwyer, author of Tokens

“Amateurs! makes the case that platforms inviting us to create art as a means of communications became traps. Arguing that internet amateurism is “an aesthetic revolution as big as modernism,” Walsh traces both how it allows for greater activism and solidarity, while also creating the conditions for exploitation: AI resource guzzling, alt-right brain rot, and the brutal inequities of neoliberal economic extraction.”
—Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“From the author of Girl Online, a new manifesto building on the hyperdeveloped internet society of the twenty-first century. Amateurs builds on Time magazine’s 2006 assertion that ‘you’ are the person of the year — the stragglers and marginalized communities that ultimately build the internet’s biggest trends and rhythms.”
—OurCulture, Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2025

“Joanna Walsh, whose blend of savagely astute analytical thinking and quality narrative chops never fails to enlighten, inform and provoke, whatever her choice of subject may be.”
—Stu Hennigan, The Bookseller

“An insightful exploration…[Walsh’s] amateurs were liable to use the word aesthetic with particular pleasure and self-consciousness. She celebrates the aesthetic they created, and mourns it, and celebrates it again.”
—James Gleick, The New York Review of Books