I kind of look at it this way. In eras past, the intellectual and material wealth of a civilization inhered in its achievements--its "great works." Today, however, we are somewhat more fair and egalitarian and such.
So, instead of giving one lady a Taj Mahal, putting up one guy's Great Pyramid, or interring one big shot's massive terra cotta army, we give more or less everybody a shot at an SUV, a smart phone, and a venti non-fat caffe caramel macchiato -- Did I say that right? -- (and we have pretty much determined that it's not a good idea to try to "consume" all of them at the same time).
Mass-produced consumer goods instead of unique Wonders of the World. Paradigm shift. Different measures of value.
What if Shah Jehan had said to his twenty-thousand artisans, "Hey guys, instead of building a monument for the eons, why don't you take all these materials we have assembled, the finest gems and stone gathered from all over the continent, and each of you just do something to amuse or impress your friends?" What if Khufu had commanded his 7000-strong labor force to render the giant limestone blocks into small representations of whatever was on their mind at the time? What if the master builders of Chartres had said, "Hey, you village peasant-types, here are some pieces of stained glass. See how many cute pictures of kittens you can make out of them."
Yeah, the historians of the future are going to have to adapt their discipline's techniques to include a robust capacity for intellectual waste management.
Hey, there may be some things of relative value in there, though. Who (except the historians of the future) can tell? Perhaps it's like that infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters theorem..Except that we are now dealing with around two billion . . . umm "monkey surrogates?" . . and maybe about the same number of social media content input interface instances.
So yeah, it could take a quite a while before anything really valuable shows up.
Oh yeah, and what if the Ming Emperors, weary of many decades of costly maintenance, had opted for an ad-based funding model for the Great Wall of China? Just asking you to think about it.
Historians of the Future, Sorry About All My Photos Called DSC987234534.jpg or Whatever