Proletarians of the Screen

Helena Aeberli investigates the aesthetics of memes and trash essays in Joanna Walsh’s “Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters.”

By Helena AeberliSeptember 25, 2025

• Cultural Studies

DO YOU REMEMBER your first meme? That is, the first meme you encountered online. Perhaps it was Pepe the Frog, with his knowing side-eye, or a sneering Trollface, or a flashing GIF of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” dance. Perhaps it was a Rickroll. For the younger members of Gen Z, your first meme might have looked more sophisticated, with lowercase Comic Sans text rather than clunky bold all-caps, above a co-opted stock photo or blurry snapshot. Mine, I think, was the LOLcat “I can has cheezburger?”—a cutesy and slightly stupid-looking cat posing the nonsensical question in large superimposed text. As a kid, I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know who had made it, or why. I neither wanted nor particularly liked cheeseburgers, and I didn’t really think that cats should either. But I knew it was funny, because of its quirky and apparently meaningless combination of words and image, and because of the frequency with which it kept popping up in my early internet adventures, often in increasingly bastardized forms. (I wanted “I can has wi-fi?” on a T-shirt, but settled for “don’t steal my wi-fi” instead, which tells you all you need to know about 2013.) The possibilities of the meme were endless.

Follow-up question: Do you remember the first meme you made? I don’t, mainly because I spent half of the 2010s making them, or at least mimicking trending formats on Tumblr and Twitter, most of which have been long forgotten. I’d insert some characters I liked into a text-post template, or edit new words over a quirky image doing the rounds. In fact, perhaps “made” is the wrong word here, one bound up with the old-school, meatspace art world and its traditionalist pretensions, its veneration of the supreme act of individual creation. The internet is very far from that world.

“Meming,” writes Joanna Walsh in a chapter on LOLcats in her new book Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, “is at once a creative and a critical act, and a meme is better defined not as a single instance of an image macro but as its evolution over time […] One person cannot make a meme.” A meme, Walsh suggests, is a kind of network stretching across time and space, a community produced through and around a particular form of aesthetics, rather than a singular art object with a unique “aura,” in Walter Benjamin’s term. First coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 to refer to a genetic unit that evolves through imitation, the meme is now a unit of culture. It is ever-evolving and formed in practice as users engage with and alter aspects of the work without ever challenging its overarching aesthetic. In the case of the earliest memes, like LOLcats, this aesthetic is often visibly clunky and clumsy, the opposite of the art traditionally displayed in galleries. Updating Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” for the internet age, Walsh argues that “memes are valuable neither because of their originality, their provenance, nor their proximity to the source or context of original production.” Instead, they are formed in a kind of collective praxis, which blurs the lines between production, consumption, and criticism. It is the accumulation of the additions acquired in circulation that gives the meme its value.

Memes are an amateur art form, and it is Walsh’s contention that we should take the implications of this seriously—both that the internet is a site of a distinctive aesthetics and that it is amateurism that has produced those aesthetics. Sprawling and theoretically rich, Amateurs! is a passionate and provocative account of this online amateurism. Walsh, a multidisciplinary writer and artist who has written numerous books and received many awards, describes herself as an amateur turned professional, and credits social media for the development of her creative practice. She writes in the first-person plural, looping her readers and online fellow travelers into a relation of solidarity, a communal effort to rehabilitate the “user” as producer and acclaim the connective, creative power of amateurism. We the People of the internet … Making the case that the user-generated spaces of Web 2.0 amounted to a revolution in the history of the internet, Amateurs! explores the amateurs who shaped our online worlds before the explosion of algorithms and AI, from the owners of the LOLcat site I Can Has Cheezburger? to James Bridle, founder of the mid-2010s “New Aesthetic,” to the early Instagram influencers satirized by artist Amalia Ulman in her 2014 performance piece Excellences & Perfections.

Each of Walsh’s nine chapters takes as its title a year and a theme—“2020: Wikidentities,” “2011: The Old Aesthetic,” etc. These chapters are arranged in no particular order, which can be confusing; one minute we’re in 2001, watching the Twin Towers collapse with artist William Basinski, the next we’re in 2023, as the first DALL-E-generated “artworks” appear on our feeds, sporting extra fingers and other such freakeries. This disorienting randomness is, I think, part of Walsh’s stated purpose as an amateur on amateurs, her acknowledgment that “there will be something wrong with this book—something uncomfortable, distasteful,” a tension between scholarly knowledge and 21st-century kitsch.

When this works, it works well. The chapter “2014: Selfies—Three Auto-portraits” knits together three micro-essays on online authenticity and identity. A sensitive consideration of autofiction and the contemporary demand for writers to perform identity online is followed by a thought-provoking piece on influencers and a short reflection on viewing content created by those who are now dead. This chapter is full of eclectic theoretical bric-a-brac, with the occasional standout observation, whether connecting the “affective turn” in the humanities to the replacement of the Twitter reaction star with a heart, or characterizing Ulman’s 2014 Instagram performance piece as “a contemporary Rake’s Progress.”

In “2020: Wikidentities,” Walsh explores the profusion of online aesthetics during and after COVID-19 lockdown. “Aesthetics” is a slippery word on the internet. Seemingly divorced from the term’s traditional association with the philosophy of beauty, online aesthetics are a kind of cultivated vibe curated through images of objects and experiences with which the curator is not necessarily in direct contact. Cottagecore doesn’t necessitate living in a cottage, just as dark academia isn’t the exclusive domain of those studying at elite universities. Like memes, aesthetics are a practice of curation, citation, and community building; dark academia might romanticize the traditional imagery of academia, but it also provides a lively venue for critique, particularly when adopted by groups underrepresented in the academy, such as Black women. Rather than dismissing aesthetics, Walsh is alert to their radical potential, relocating aesthetic movements from the hierarchical, exclusive art world to the messy, malleable spaces of the internet. While the proliferation of aesthetics is bound up with platforms seeking to profit from their users’ identities, it also offers those who cannot afford to stake a claim to identity, or whose identities are unrepresented offline, a chance to situate and define themselves, “in order to claim a platform” of their own.

One of these platforms is the personal essay, which Walsh analyses in “2015: In Praise of the Trash Essay.” The “trash essay,” in contrast to the professional personal essay, is that which is “frequently trashed,” “considered disposable,” or “trashy” in its self-exposure. It is a form that is almost always feminized, associated particularly with the mid-2010s online magazine Jezebel, although perhaps increasingly with The Cut and Substack as well. For Walsh, the trash essay is interesting—and the source of anxiety—because of the way it blurs the relations between style and content, truth and art, fiction and nonfiction. Particularly when essayists disclose something taboo, the trash essay, like a kind of abject selfie, dances on the knife-edge between authenticity and artificiality. Jezebel gave young female writers a chance to assert an identity online but also tied that identity to self-disclosure.

The trash essay is cringey, clickbaity, confessional, Susan Sontag’s campy “stylization.” It is art, but not quite. It is this not-quite-artness that unites the trash essay with the meme, the online aesthetic, the selfie, and the AI artwork: the aesthetic traces of an amateurism that refuses the smooth, structured elegance of traditional style and, in doing so, opens up an alternative way of doing art. The web is a sprawling, rhizomatic network transmitting power and possibility. Amateurs have always been exploited in this complex system of entanglements, but they have also gained an unprecedented position as the prime drivers of online culture. Because we all create on the internet, no matter how habitually or informally, we are all amateurs, and thus we all have a stake in the game.

Walsh’s greatest strength is the attention she pays to labor, specifically to how the internet is changing the relations of production and consumption. Amateurs! never shies away from interrogating the social, economic, and interpersonal networks—as well as the network of the web—that go into making art. While the online world has extended artistic opportunities to amateurs, it has also sought new ways to exploit them. Amateurism is, by definition, unpaid labor, but the collection and sale of our personal data means our amateur creative acts have become a seemingly limitless source of profit for capitalism. Whenever we post a selfie or like a mood board or share a meme, we’re performing aesthetic labor for free, a mystified, gamified form of work masquerading as leisure. We might enjoy posting and sharing, but we’ve become “proletarians of the screen,” creating content for platforms we do not have a stake in, via a means of production we do not own, for little to no profit.

These exploitative relations operate offline too; “data mining” is not simply a metaphor for extraction—it involves literal mining. The “cloud” is not nearly as intangible and invisible as it sounds. Online aesthetics are directly implicated in environmental destruction and neocolonialism, from water shortages exacerbated by generative AI to the vast amount of greenhouse gases generated by data centers and personal devices. Walsh coins the phrase “digital disclosure” to call for more transparency about the networks of exploitation hidden behind online artworks and the platforms that support and profit from them. It’s a powerful slogan, but one that it’s difficult to imagine Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Sam Altman taking seriously.

Things are changing. According to Walsh, this began with the demise of old Twitter following Musk’s 2022 buyout, and the slow creative exodus away from the site (leaving those of us who remain feeling rather like cockroaches after the apocalypse). Today, “the amateur internet is beginning to look less like a movement than a moment,” one bound by a peculiar confluence of technology, economics, and creative play. The open spaces of the digital commons that facilitated that moment are increasingly being replaced by digital enclosures, with creativity, connection, and fulfillment supplanted by an increasingly siloed and slop-saturated online world. Web 2.0 might have liberated amateur creativity, but on Web 3.0, human-made aesthetic products are scraped by algorithms and reconstituted by AI. Another internet revolution is underway, one led not by enthusiastic amateurs but by platform capitalism and the people in power.

Reading Amateurs! is not unlike scrolling a Tumblr blog circa 2017. Wide-ranging, dense, and passionate, it hopscotches from Sigmund Freud to Sianne Ngai, McKenzie Wark’s 2004 Hacker Manifesto to Jia Tolentino’s 2017 retrospective on Jezebel. Walsh is an enthusiastic defender of the amateur, and Amateurs! is itself a project of enthusiastic amateurism. At several points, she describes her jumps in thought as “hyperlinks.” In true Web 2.0 style, these hyperlinked connections are founded on interest and passion rather than true coherence, on breadth of engagement rather than studied depth. If this all sounds a bit exhausting, that’s because it is. Some of Walsh’s references are underdeveloped; others rely on a hefty level of prior reading. Little-known artworks are mentioned without context or reproduction. This is theory about the internet, but it is also internet-as-theory, rich in its own striking neologisms and wry asides, a pick and mix of highbrow and lowbrow, skating somewhere between the meme and academe. We are far from the traditional academic tome, but we are even further from the ever-scrolling, algorithmically curated feeds passively consumed in the contemporary online world. Amateurs! demands the engagement it theorizes, engagement that is a form of amateurish attentiveness, that is also a form of love.

Today, we all live on the internet, that strange space that increasingly seems more real than life itself. Living on the internet requires that we take it seriously, that we explore the distinct periods of its history and the potential paths of its future, especially the particular, peculiar forms of art it has helped produce. That we theorize it, as a site of ethics as well as aesthetics, of production as well as consumption, of labor as well as leisure. Joanna Walsh has proven herself more than capable of taking up that challenge. 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.