Ruins from an ancient past

A couple years ago, we went through an old shopping mall that was ground zero for teen life when I was growing up.  It's mostly empty now.  Exactly what is keeping it alive, I'll never know.  We were just driving through the town, saw it, and couldn't resist a peek.

As we walked down alone through the mall, past one closed shop after another, we passed a small room containing some old video game machines.  There were probably a half dozen or so, plus a couple arcade style games like pinball.  None I had ever heard of. 

We explained to our boys that, was a time, such places were teaming with kids, teens, even adults.  You had to wait in line for the popular ones (Pac-Man was always standing room only).  And they were everywhere.  We even had one in our little town, at first near a downtown parking lot, then down a side street beside an old pharmacy.  It didn't last more than a couple years.  But it was there during the peak. 

They say the Arabs used to have an old proverb that goes 'All things fear time, but time fears the pyramids.'  That's because even by the time of Moses and the Exodus, the pyramids were relics from thousands of years earlier.  Even today, people travel to see the ruins of ancient civilization, medieval castles, even baroque architecture and displays of hundreds of years ago. 

I wonder how much of what we have today will last anywhere near that long.  Two thousand years from now, the last couple centuries will be part of a larger period, perhaps the 'industrial' or 'technological early years', or something.  Maybe the tech dark ages.  You never know.  Save for the world wars, beginning of nuclear weapons, and possibly the death of 2500 years of growth toward democracy and liberty, I doubt there will be anything to set one century apart from another.  Anymore than we reckon periods of ancient Egyptian, Chinese or neolithic Europe by centuries, much less decades.

If the last couple generations are any indications, much of what we cling to  now won't last the generation that birthed it.  If technology has made change lickety-split for anything and everything imaginable, we seem to discard places and things as antiquated and archaic just as quickly.  Things that define culture today are gone tomorrow.  Not that change has ever been as slow as we sometimes make it.  Believe it or not, on a cultural and social level, things could change fairly quickly, even wtihin decades, back in the day.  That's, back in the Medieval or ancient day.

But today, the speed with which so many culturally defining phenomena pass into the shadows is telling.  I can't help but wonder how much - if anything - will be left for historians a thousand years to even know about, much less study.

I thought of this when I saw a fun little romp through the history of arcades at the height of video game mania.  If you can get past the picture of Spielberg with an open shirt in his office next to a game I never heard of, it's a pretty amusing little trip down memory lane for those who remember when MTV still played videos.