As we all predicted back in the 1990s, the net has spawned new opportunities for independent creators and consumers of all sorts. Blogs, YouTube, print-on-demand, 3D printing, Etsy, eBay, 99designs, Upwork, SoundCloud, Substack, and many many other platforms give creators the ability to make things and sell (or at least distribute) them pretty directly to wide audiences, without signing a contract or getting a job with a movie studio, magazine, publisher, record company, or advertising agency.

The problem is, all this activity was subsumed by a few monopolist platforms that take way more of a share of the profits than they deserve. YouTube and Spotify aren’t much better for the typical artist than Uber and DoorDash are for the typical gig worker. But the decentralized web — that blockchain stuff — could change this. At least for a while.

The best argument I’ve heard for NFTs is that they give creators the ability to retain ownership of their creations, make money, and get credit. I don’t just mean the overpriced, speculative icons of cats or monkeys that people are betting on these days. Sure, those are a way for artists with memetic charm to make crazy money in the short-term, but they’re just a fad and most buyers are going to be hurt when that bubble pops.

No, the more sustainable and revolutionary aspect of all this is the way NFT technology can be used almost like a benevolent, and surveillance-free form of digital rights management for independent creators. Most simply, an NFT unleashes a new potential for the internet to do two-way linking — where every instance of a file links back to its origin, the creator, who can be paid for the sale or use or reuse. A writer can issue a book as an NFT. A musician can release a song. And, potentially, even filmmakers can release whole movies and television shows that way, liberating themselves from the studio system, television channels, or streaming services.

Every creator becomes a studio, a publication, or a streaming service, a new universe of à la carte everything.

For consumers, this is the direction things have been going ever since the internet swallowed up television into its digital universe. Like many who are too invested in trying to keep up with streaming media, I have purchased subscriptions to more apps and channels than I can afford the time or money for. I can justify HBO and Netflix, as well as maybe Amazon (it comes free with Prime, anyway) and a cable package (family demands the food and home shows). But I ended up signing up for Peacock to see Grant Morrison’s version of Brave New World, CBS all access (for Star Trek when it was on there), Paramount (for Star Trek when it moved there), Criterion (which I actually watch), Disney (so the family could see Hamilton and Grogu), and AppleTV because it came with my new laptop.

It’s too much. The idea of offering people the ability to purchase some media à la carte is great. Someone who only watches a few channels, or who doesn’t want to support a particular news channel, should be able to purchase what they want. But many of these new channels are the only way to watch certain shows, effectively Balkanizing audiences into separate groups.

Similarly, as some of my favorite writers get angry about the way newspapers and magazines edit their pieces, they quit their regular columns and start private blogs or Substacks. If I want to read them, I have to purchase separate subscriptions for each. So now I’m not only paying more, but I’m doing the additional labor of curation and discovery — something that magazine editors knew how to do better than me. No, they may not have known exactly my taste, but that was the point. They were expanding my world.

A new world of NFT-based media may liberate us all to watch just the things we want. No more Netflix or Amazon subscription; I just buy my NFT version of a show via blockchain, straight from the creator. But it’s going to make for an almost unfathomably vast, unnavigable sea of individual offerings. It’s hard enough to find things now. And if we need to make a monetary choice every time we do the digital equivalent of flipping the channel — or maybe after a short preview — it turns an evening of viewing or reading into a series of purchasing decisions.

Plus, if every artist is out on their own, what happens to that feeling of content neighborhoods, a channel’s personality, a magazine’s perspective, or even a posse of artists? It’s an entropic extreme of every creator for themself.

Before very long, we’ll see the emergence of some clubs of NFT creators, banding together for mutual support and revenue sharing. So maybe we subscribe to this group of 10 Substack writers for a single fee, or that group of 20 filmmakers. Soon, new services will arise that help artists find compatible colleagues with whom to network. And maybe those services will offer single subscription fees for access to every creator in their system.

The best of those, let’s call them “platforms” or “channels” may start making so much revenue that they can call the shots, admitting or dismissing artists based on their revenue, making “suggestions” about content or casting, or even soliciting or, dare we say, developing content of their own using members of the network.

Oops, we’re back where we started. Aggregation leads to disaggregation. Disaggregation leads to aggregation. Inhale. Exhale.