Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

“The internet has made us all amateurs,” asserts artist and critic Walsh (Girl Online) in this perceptive but meandering philosophical survey of Web 2.0. Walsh examines how the user-centric internet of the 2000s and 2010s “opened up creative practice on a huge scale to those without money, training, or access.” Ruminating on phenomena as varied as LOLcats and the entry for “dark academia” on Aesthetics Wiki, Walsh not only reveals how these amateur aesthetics shaped and were shaped by the internet but how they “blur[red] the lines between.... the experience of producing and consuming.” The author’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.” Her choice in subjects, too, is pleasantly surprising, like when she discusses the era’s proliferation of simplistic vaporwave music (“elevator music without an occupant”). However, the book’s sharpness is dulled by copious quotes from other theorists. It’s strongest during more focused moments, among them an impassioned defense of the “trash essay”—Walsh’s term for the frequently maligned confessional essays that flourished during this period—and her spot-on articulation of AI art’s “uncanny” depiction of “not offscreen reality” but “reality as depicted via common media aesthetics.” Despite the title, this is best suited for those well-versed in the subject. (Sept.)