![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Amateurs.jpg\")
Tom Sawyer is an ideal role model for any would-be tech titan. Convincing people it was a rare privilege to paint his fence for him, and then getting gifts from them for doing for it \u2014 a kite, a handful of marbles, and a dead rat and a string to swing it on \u2014 turns out to be a scalable technique.<\/p>\n
If Tom were real and alive today, he\u2019d get a lot more than a dead rat on a string when people do his work for him: A multibillion-dollar Internet company. Since the earliest days of the web, fortunes have been built because people have been willing to create content for free as a way to connect with others, while tech titans find ways to make money off their labor.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one of Joanna Walsh\u2019s central arguments in this book, and she\u2019s right on target. She writes:<\/p>\n
The proletarians of the screen \u2014 the influencer\/tweeter\/TikToker \u2014 make aesthetic content for their platforms via a means of production they do not own, and the platform owners recoup the economic surplus-value, but the whole process runs on another, less recuperable surplus: the consumers\u2019 and the makers\u2019 surplus-enjoyment, which hides the labour in this process. Online, what looks like leisure is now work.<\/p>\n
That web dynamic, she points out, didn\u2019t start with the social media sites that use the technique so well. She harkens back to the earlier days of the web and LOLCat site www.icanhascheezburger.com in 2007 as a forerunner to more sophisticated sites that steal people\u2019s labor and convince them they\u2019re having fun.<\/p>\n
For the lucky among us whose memory is short or have never encountered a LOLCat, a LOLCat was a photo of an adorable cat with a self-consciously childish wacky caption like \u201cI can has cheeseburger?\u201d The icanhascheezburger site which hosted it all was launched on a lark and made the initial founders no money. But then it was bought by a savvy entrepreneur who figured out ways to grow traffic by deploying tricks like having people rating each LOLcat on a one-to-five scale, and selling ads with each page view.<\/p>\n
Those were simpler days, of course. So, to bring things up to date, Walsh traces the many ways in which the online aesthetic created by web consumers has been milked over the years by smart tech execs to become immensely wealthy.<\/p>\n
She makes more than that economic argument, though. She also argues that web users have created their own distinctive online aesthetic and traces how that aesthetic has evolved since the earliest days of the web. And that\u2019s where things go off the rails. Her writing and analysis of the changing web\u2019s aesthetic is so full of dense jargon, fractured syntax, and attempts to be au courant at all times, that it\u2019s largely incomprehensible. Good luck deciphering this example, which is typical of much of what you\u2019ll find in the book:<\/p>\n
Though there are clear links between the stuplimity of LOL-speak and the language of digital blackface, LOLcats don\u2019t directly quote external media either visually or lexically but are hermetic, feeding only off other LOLcats. That the speakers are now cats creates an \u2018interesting\u2019 distance, explaining LOLcats\u2019 popularity with L2 speakers like Huh as a safe space for playing out and playing with \u2018mistake\u2019, a mechanism that is matched by LOLcats\u2019 tendency to depict cute #fails.<\/p>\n
If that\u2019s not enough to put you off this book, it\u2019s also seriously marred by Walsh trying far too hard to find big meanings and portents where there are none. In just one example, she writes about the composer William Basinski releasing tape loops on CDs which were made from some of his ambient noise recordings. He noticed that when he transferred the loops to digital media their quality deteriorated \u2014 no great revelation. She writes that when he made the final loop transfer to a CD on September 11, 2001, he went to his rooftop and videotaped the Twin Towers disintegrating. Then she says this:<\/p>\n
Basinski\u2019s work marked a moment of change in global politics and in global technology. It put the world in which the Twin Towers existed into the past, where it survived only on the cover of Macintosh Plus\u2019s vaporware album Floral Shoppe. Basinski\u2019s tape caught the last train from analog to digital.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s so much wrong with that paragraph that it\u2019s hard to know where to begin. Suffice it to say, in Walsh\u2019s desperate attempt to find meaning where there\u2019s none, she gets everything in it wrong.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a shame she falls into these traps. There\u2019s a great book to be written about how everyday users create the content that powers the web, while billionaires reap the profits. But this one isn\u2019t it.<\/p>\n
Preston Gralla has won a Massachusetts Arts Council Fiction Fellowship and had his short stories published in a number of literary magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review and Pangyrus. His journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, USA Today, and Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, among others, and he\u2019s published nearly 50 books of nonfiction which have been translated into 20 languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Preston Gralla There\u2019s a great book to be written about how everyday users create the content that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1638,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-203067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-internet","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}