As I argued in my 2007 book Cult of the Amateur - one critical area where American creativity is being undermined by technology is in the highly destructive impact of illegal Internet file-sharing on the entertainment industry. And this mass larceny is as economically catastrophic today as it was three years ago. Today, 63% of the musical content downloaded off the Internet is stolen, revenue from recorded music sales are down by almost half over the last ten years and, as a consequence, employment in the recorded music industry has fallen 60%. Thus, as Commerce Secretary Gary Locke acknowledged earlier this week in a speech at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, fighting online theft is a "is a fundamental issue of America's economic competitiveness." It's a battle that all politicians - from Gary Locke to Carly Fiorina to Barack Obama - absolutely must embrace if this country is to retain its economic edge in the 21st century.

But it's not just piracy that threatens American creativity in the 21st century. In the three years since the publication of my book, it has become clearer and clearer that the Internet represents the future of the entertainment industry. The slow but inexorable convergence of television and the Internet, the meteoric growth of online video services like YouTube and Hulu, the flowering of the Android and iPhone app economy, the growing popularity of the Kindle and the iPad, the resurrection of Pandora and the promise of Apple's new Ping social music service all point to the vitality of the American digital economy in the 21st century. In ten years, physical creative products - whether books, photographs, newspapers, CDs or DVDs - will be rarities. Our entire entertainment economy is immigrating online. For better or worse, the future of American creativity lies in the digital sphere.

According to Daniel Pink, the author of the New York Times best-selling Drive, the great shift of the early 21st century is from left to right. Rather than a political change, however, Pink's shift is all about the brain. The 21st century, he argues, represents the triumph of our creative right brain skills over the more procedural thinking of our left brain.

Words have once again become subversive. Last February, when Helene Hegemann, the 17-year-old German author of the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll "novel" Axolotl Roadkill, was said to have plagiarized portions of this 2010 book from a blogger, she responded by hurling a grenade of a sentence back at her accusers.

"There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," the Berlin-based writer said, ironically issuing this subversive statement through her venerable publisher Ullstein-Verlag, a business which, for nearly 140 years, has been predicated upon selling copies of its authors' original words.

Note that Hegemann didn't just place authenticity above originality within her pantheon of creative values. The teenage writer's statement actually denies that originality--a central assumption of the creative economy for the past 150 years--exists.

 "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity."

In Hegemann's creative universe, where it's impossible to be original because everything has been said before, all that is left for the author to cultivate is the virtue of individual authenticity by, it seems, transparently reorganizing other people's work. But in the shadow of the death sentence Hegemann imposes upon originality, what distinguishes authentic from inauthentic writing?

According to Hegemann, it's the uniqueness of the author's organization of other people's material, rather than the uniqueness of his or her writing, which defines authenticity. As she told the daily newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, "I myself don't feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me."