Dear Little Bald Bastard,
In 1,000 years, what will archaeologists who dig up Nike merchandise with the Michael Jordan logo think it means?
- Sarawesome
Dear Sarawesome,
It's hard to say what future researchers, rummaging through the remains of long-vanished early-millennial America, will make of the iconic spread-eagled silhouette. Will they recognize it as representative of superlative basketball talent turned into marketing gold? Or will they mistake it for a weirdly lumpy bird?
The key seems to be whether or not some civilization ending event happens between now and our hypothetical dig. We live in a hyperrecorded, obsessively archived age; the Intertubes are clogged with pictures of every cat in the industrialized world. With the sheer volume of information being stored every second, and given a smooth ascent into a glorious, flying car-filled future, it's hard to believe that any society sophisticated enough to make organized study of its predecessors wouldn't be able to find some reference to explain a symbol that was, during our time, so ubiquitous.
Then again, the logo could be uncovered on the other side of a catastrophe sufficiently horrible to destroy our delicate technological infrastructure. There are plenty of candidates; supervolcanoes, asteroid strikes, nuclear war and drug-resistant bacteria could all do the trick. It's hard to know what a rebuilt civilization, without the benefit of our LOLcats, will think of us and our marketing tools. However, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that they'll think those FCUK shirts are pretty fucking stupid.
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