Amateurs! is the story of how YOU created internet culture and why it matters. Web 2.0 invited users to create: blogs, vlogs, tweets, memes and more. For the first time in history, art became *the* fundamental form of communication. What started as fun became a currency--vital for finding friends, work and love--then, as meatspace job security eroded, work. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge for use, selling our creations back to us. Whatever we're making online, it isn't amateur any more. A Radical History of the Internet as a place of creativity: where aesthetics has become a currency and the cost of being online. "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 "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." Claire Bishop, author of Disordered Attention Published by Verso