What did you make on the internet, back before anyone was paying you to?

This time around, Ben takes the interview chair. He's talking with Joanna Walsh, writer, artist, arts activist, author of twelve books, several of them co-written with AIs she coded herself (badly and on purpose <3). Her new book Amateurs! is a philosophical history of the internet we all built for free: the Tumblrs, the blogs, the aesthetic wikis, the momentary flashes of hilarity. Her starting point is the French sense of the word—amateur, from amour. Not a beginner or someone who isn't any good, but someone who does the thing for love, without expecting to be paid.

Joanna and Ben get into what happened to the braided conversation of early Twitter, the difference between paying attention online and performing it, and why Joanna's answer to "should we just log off?" is an immediate and emphatic no. There's a thread about vulgarity—she means it as a compliment—and what it revealed when people started mashing up Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Then there's the dead internet: how we'd know we'd arrived, and whether we'd know at all. Joanna's image for it involves the sea, and it's the best thirty seconds in the episode.

Her advice for anyone starting out right now isn't optimism. It's a union card.

Resources

Guest's book: Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters by Joanna Walsh (Verso, 2025)

Ben's Rec: New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle. Also worth your time: Ways of Being.

Caitlin's Rec: What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation by Erich Hatala Matthes (Oxford University Press, 2024)

New: we're putting outros and bookends up on video. Find the Simplify page on YouTube and tell us what you think — we're experimenting with all of it.

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at info@kollomedia.com

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and Molly Hart. Engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

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Joanna Walsh: Amateurs Made The Internet

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Joanna Walsh: Amateurs Made The Internet