I really wanted to like this book; the premise about the internet making us all amateurs and democratising creative endeverous is intriguing and matches what we see on the online world, furthermore its a Verso book and I'm usually a big fan of their non-fiction. However I feel like the book is not as impactful as it should be. The book reads more as a selection of short essays as opposed to a cohesive thesis.

I found the section on generative AI to be particularly disappointing, the author spending time playing with image gen AI tools undermines any negative take that could be made "This is Fun" was such an bad phrase to use. The author then goes on to make pretty whishy washy takes about image gen AI and how it exploits the labour of people to regurgitate images/text heading into the uncanny valley. This was a great location for a nuanced discussion about AI ethical and environmental impacts and how LLM cannot think and converge to the same looks/phrases. Instead the primary takeaway is that:
"AI further reinforces the amateur status of its involuntary contributors by offering them neither acknowledgement or pay."
This is an incredibly polite way to summarising the web scraping AI models are trained on and the outrage this has caused from people in the creative fields and how much they disagree with AI usage in this form.

I wanted to love this book but the writing is too shallow and AI essay was awful.

Thanks to Netgalley and Verso for the advanced copy

I have no idea how to describe this book, in my personal database I tagged it with politics, sociology, philosophy and tech, which should tell you everything.

This is the kind of book I absolutely love, the kind that gives me a lot to think about. I’ve been spiralling in my own brain thinking about the fact that once upon a time we used the internet as amateurs, for fun, without expecting anything in return ; but now most people on social media are hoping to “make it” somehow, to become a full time content creator, to make money out of it. And I think I already knew that but never really thought about what it meant for us a as a society. This quote says it way better than I could

“The proletarians of the screen  – the influencer/tweeter/ TikToker  – 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’ and the makers’ surplus-enjoyment, which hides the labour in this process. Online, what looks like leisure is now work.”

That’s something I’ve been thinking about too, the fact that people are building careers using platforms they have no control over, remember the Tiktok ban and the way American users freaked out?

There’s a bit of travelling through internet’s history, and if like me you’re an older millennial it’s really fun (I did have a live journal account, and a tumblr) and a lot of quoting french philosophers which I loved (I’m french and I do love to do philosophy for free as a hobby).

This is not the best book I have ever read, but it did make me think a lot and inspired a lot of conversations both personally and professionally.

I think the upfront of the book was more solid than the remainder, which was disappointing.

I wanted so much to like the book. But it was all over the place, the references were ok but they were scattered and the writing was too fast paced for a book. I agree with the premise of the book - I only wish is was more like a book and less like a short essay on substack. The third star is for the solid list of sources.
Thank you to Verso and to Netgalley for kindly offering me this book in exchange of an honest review.