Why would someone built a model of the Enterprise out of Lego? Or perhaps I should ask (because I spent most of my early teenage years building Lego models of TV and movie space-crafts and vehicles) why would anyone decide to make a scale model of the Enterprise, investing considerable money and effort in the process and putting detailed pictures of the whole process online? I think the answer would be something like micro-fame.
Before this weird online culture fusion called the internet happened, individuals were forced to seek the approval of their peers by conforming or by accomplishing things that their real-life friends and family thought were valuable. This low-level success was based on a narrowly focused set of criteria set by your upbringing, your neighbourhood, your school or job… And if you wanted to take it further then you were forced to somehow breach the membrane that separated the ‘ordinary’ from the ‘famous’ – something that only the incredibly talented or incredibly lucky could do…
This made the world relatively predictable – relatively safe. Ideas were constantly created and constantly abandoned as ever, but there was the continual encouragement of environment not to be one of the people who did anything ‘odd’. The internet has changed all that. There’s now an audience for the strangest and smallest little projects. All the disconnected people around the world who might find a Lego Enterprise cool are suddenly connected up. It’s worth making that tiny little thing you thought would be quite cool once, it’s worth writing the dumb ideas down that you thought no one would ever listen to. Because the odds of finding people who will care about them, will gel and relate to you, will celebrate your idea or project and make you famous (tiny-fame, micro-idol), is radically improved. The future will be full of dumb projects, tiny ideas, silly concepts – each celebrated by their own bespoke fan-base… And human creativity will have taken a massive leap forward…