I’ve mentioned lately my suspicions that the idea of authorship might be dying out. I don’t think that people will no longer create art or writings but that the concept of attaching one’s name to the final work will decline. (Indeed, my understand is this is how much of European music was written in the pre-baroque era—you didn’t know the composer.)
This theme arises in an interesting article about “creepy pasta.” Creepy Pastas are short scary stories spread across the internet via “cut and paste.” As the article notes, because of this method, the author’s name often fades while the story survives.

What motivates the authors of all this stuff? Ego must play its part, but it’s interesting that the criterion for ‘success’ is a kind of oblivion for the creator. A winning copypasta is one that’s copied and pasted — one that gets circulated and shared, blending into urban myth, FOAFlore, netlore. The role of the author is not to be remembered down the ages; it is to disappear. In this respect, creepypasta appears to brush aside 250 years of authorial gothic, weird and horror fiction, returning shudder-making to its cultural roots. With its rituals and shared experiences, it seems more social than artistic. Scary stories, after all, serve social purposes: they help us to learn which fears are widely held and which are idiosyncratic, defining us as societies and delineating us as individuals.