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When copying was extremely hard(back in antiquity) everyone who was an artisan was producing 1 art per 1 unit. So you didn't even need a state-level enforcement of copyright; either it was good work or it wasn't.

During the run-up to industrialization more possibilities to make units without making art came about. But the means of production were still capital and labor-intensive - there were only so many printing presses in town. Therefore, copyright built a social contract: the state enforces what the presses can do to copy your work. As soon as you exited the borders of that state, piracy was prolific.

This regime continued all the way through the 20th century and only started cracking when homemade copies became good enough, which, within media industries now fully enmeshed with state interests, the obvious response was "don't tape at home, don't copy that floppy, you wouldn't download a car."

Nowadays there is no scarcity of copies, only scarcity of attention. "Likes" are effectively a currency, but likes aren't state money, they're an awkward mediation of platform algorithms. Instead we have a two-class media system where, in each form of media, there's "the industry", which deploys all the mechanisms of the state(corporate investment, IP laws, marketing campaigns) to encourage consumers to give up their state bucks, and then the "gig workers", who have assembled a patchwork of social media mechanisms to get eyeballs to their work and pick up commissions, crowdfunding, and other forms of fundraising that allow indirect exits to state bucks. Because you mostly can't get paid for what you already did without utilizing the full might of the state, everyone is inclined to push monetization further towards promises of future work: the stretch goal, DLC, etc. Buying the rumor and selling the news.

In this framework, we have to discuss NFTs. They aren't "ready for use" in the current state of things, but they present an alternative mode of exit: discard the unit production mindset and define the art as a financial asset. It already has some analogue in the gallery system, but digitization makes it a cheap, low-friction process. With "all my apes are gone" comes some demonstration of effectiveness: You can, in fact, just put a price to art, let traders make risky gambles with it, and rely on a non-state, independently operated system to give you a cut of the resulting carnage.

What we don't have yet is strong coordination between likes and trading. What made NFTs a bubble was the degree of misrepresentation on display; far too many works were being inflated through traditional boiler-room schemes, and many more were stolen works scraped from unwilling or unaware sources. Everyone pounced on proof-of-concept tech with an angle for a rug pull. But this is the kind of thing that tech has seen many waves of: snake oil salesmen turning some genuine breakthrough into fools' gold, followed by a gradual address of each specific problem that made it foolish.

So I think of the possibilities for art as a thing society can fund and reward going forward as a thing that will look both more social-media-like and asset-like; maybe not in the specific mode NFTs took, or in the specific form that engagement on TikTok takes, but drawing on some aspects of both and building a greater-than-the-sum result.

Portal and Portal 2 recently released on the Switch