2024: I’m meeting a group of people for a literary event in a bar in Paris: writers, editors, publishers, critics. Some are professional, others unpaid enthusiasts. I guess you’d call them amateurs, except that isn’t quite the right word. In the arts – in writing, especially – enthusiastic amateurs are the gene pool of successful professionals. Or perhaps petri-dish is a more appropriate metaphor. The event is a panel on the contemporary avant-garde, which is another metaphor. That phallic, military, linear figure of speech from the industrial era doesn’t seem, to me at least, to cut it anymore – and specifically doesn’t describe our situation. What, I ask, in what is more of a comment than a question, could be a more useful spatial metaphor?
The founder of the magazine, who has since retired, his writing too “minor” (in the sense of Kafka’s phrase, after which the magazine was named), to please the mainstream, answered: what the mag had done was to connect a series of peripheries. Whereas twentieth-century, urban avant-gardes were all location, location, location, our disparate group (if you could even call it that) was composed of the peripheral. We were marginal, contingent, amateur.
The thing about these people is we’d all met online. Though many of us were meeting in meatspace for the first time, the magazine celebrated was web-only. We came from different countries, different backgrounds. We were different ages, cultures, ethnicities, genders, classes.
How did we get here?
Because internet.
These critics, designers, editors, writers, friends – or should I call them colleagues – met on early 2000s social media. Most of us were no longer on Twitter, the platform we had mostly used, or we were there sporadically, reluctantly. We were scattered between new and old alternative platforms. Many of us, including me, were no longer using social media for personal stuff. And we were hardly able to use it for our work, as the sort of work we did depended on functioning informal online networks. There was a broken link, a 404 error, and it was social.
Twitter’s death day was 28 October 2022, when Elon Musk bought the platform. It had been on the cards for a while, but it took him some time to trash what over fifteen years of amateur input had created. He began in November 2022, by charging for account verification. What had been designed in 2009 as an authenticity and accountability check began to account only for ability to pay, resulting in a number of lawsuits from public figures against fake ‘verified’ accounts in their names. Pre-Musk, Twitter charged advertisers to make the site free to the content creators who ensured its existence, but Musk charged users.
If Oct 2022 was Twitter’s death day, its funeral took years. There was a time when it was still difficult to stay off Twitter, when friends had to wean themselves off its mix of car-crash narcissism, FOMO, self-righteous bigotry, clicktivism, shamers and reply guys. Only a few years ago, a friend tweeted: “I haven’t thought about Twitter in 48h. It seems like progress.” For those of us who are still there it’s not working for us anymore, even though we’re working for it. When I go on Twitter now, I don’t get response, interaction. I don’t see people I follow, who follow me. I see people (when they are people) who paid to be there, tweeting things that keep them there. It’s like speaking to an empty room that is somehow also full. Or rather, it’s exactly like being offline where who gets heard and whose work gets seen so often depends on who already has contacts, context or money. Creativity won’t get you anywhere anymore.
What used to be a performative communication network has become a network of performative non-communication. But users who bemoan Twitter’s demise are still there. Where else is there to go? I went over to one of the alternatives and found it was like Twitter in the early 2010s. Twitter pre-Trump, pre-outrage. People swapped recipes and book recommendations, posted pictures of flowers, were openly grateful that it was “like old Twitter.” At first, like them, I thought this must be paradise. Then I found I didn’t want old Twitter anymore. I wanted a Twitter where something was at stake.
That’s because Twitter has formed what was my amateur, and is now my professional, practice – as well as my politics, as aesthetics and politics are never not linked. And that’s something it taught me too. Twitter taught me to be entertaining. It taught me to be smart. How to move someone. How to make them laugh in 140, then 280 characters. It taught me how to make my point playfully, sharply; to ask, sometimes successfully, for change. It taught me how to combine an image with a phrase in a way that causes the gap of meaning to mean more than either component. It taught me how to use these techniques to start and grow activist networks.
On Twitter, more than anywhere else, politics are aesthetics, and aesthetics are political: from Trump’s crowd-pulling grammatical mistakes to hashtag activism – #blacklivesmatter, #metoo. On Twitter, the joke is a political mode; the confession is a political mode; so is outrage; so are memes. They are political not only in their content. They are political because they are there, in this public forum. They are political because so many come from people who never had a voice in any public forum before.
At the same time the political, via the aesthetic, is personal. Because these creative acts are also how we argue, flirt, parent, find friends, get work: they are how we’ve learned to relate to each other, how we’ve made our lives. “We used to be a society,” tweeted @messyventura in February 2024.1 In losing Twitter, I lost a dimension of how to be social. And also a dimension of how to be creative. I see tweets – anomalous meatspace juxtapositions of words or images, like, as the proto-surrealist poet Lautremont wrote, “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” – and I don’t tweet them. I write tweets in my head and don’t post them. What would be the point any more?
The amateur internet is beginning to look less like a movement than a moment. We can already talk about the net as if it were geological time: “what era of the internet do you think was objectively the best?” asked @drewtoothpaste on Twitter alternative, Bluesky. “i would probably say 2007–2013 because there was enough people there to be fun but it hadn’t yet gotten concentrated into There Are Only Five Possible Websites.” “2013 as an end date makes sense,” answered @keithcalder.com. “That’s when Tumblr sold to Yahoo. I think of that as when the ‘web2’ era started to suck.”
Digital enclosure is not a new idea. The swallowing up of smaller platforms by larger is the net equivalent of the enclosure of the commons in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries: the appropriation of land used in common, for free, by landowners whose stated aim was, like platforms, efficiency, but was as often a bid to increase the value of their land by uniting it, just as a platform capitalist limits access to creativity, to connection, via platform monopolies.
“Foucault,” wrote Gilles Deleuze, “located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws.” So far, so platform. But we’re moving from Foucault’s biopolitics to an age of technopolitics, in which people are controlled less by the location of their bodies than by their access to connection.
Platform capitalism currently works by allowing access to content – much of which is amateur-generated – and the services needed to generate it only via its portals, whether that’s Google, Meta, or that name that fails to stick: X. Unlike physical space, the net is not zero sum; but there is so often nowhere else to go, particularly for the amateurs I’ve written about in this book, who are not hackers, techies or nerds, but who have other skills – or no formal skills at all – and who need a ready-made platform in order to make something.
Twitter is a paradigm for other platforms. As they become increasingly driven by shareholder profits to the exclusion of functionality – what Cory Doctorow has called “enshittification” – is it any wonder that amateurs expect more for their work than likes? Tailoring their output, they second-guess the platform’s requirements to win visibility and, with it, sponsors. Creators are back in the age of the patron.
It’s often been said that the social contract of the internet was free use in exchange for data. It’s less often said that the deal was free use in exchange for creativity. Social platforms have doubled down on extraction from users, both at the point of production and the point of consumption, as platforms have begun to sell creators’ own work back to them.
If the age of the amateur is over, this is partly amateurism’s fault. Or it’s the fault of some amateurs, because not all amateurism is the same. The amateur ethos of Web 2.0 has gone two ways. There are people who want aesthetics to be free and there are people who want to free asethetics so they can profit.
It’s a myth that artists emerge from nowhere. But it’s a myth that amateurs do too. This situation that had enabled us didn’t flourish in some utopia. It happened at a very specific moment in history, the moment at which the idealism of the early internet met the market. It happened on a specific combination of free and commercial platforms. If too many of these online spaces were modeled in the service of those who did not have amateur interests at heart or who had an interest, in the financial sense, in what amateurs produced there – pre-internet, these spaces did not exist at all.
And because they did not exist, nor did we.
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Joanna Walsh’s Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters is published by Verso and will be launched at Spike Berlin on 4 November 2025.