Future Relics is a column about the objects that our society is currently making, and how they may explain our lives to future generations. In each article, we'll focus on one item that could conceivably be discovered by someone 1,000 years from now, and try to explain where this item came from, where it's going, and what its existence explains about our current moment.

For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge , and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they're glued together. They can’t be thrown out , or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever.

These are AirPods. They’re a collection of atoms born at the dawn of the universe, churned beneath the surface of the earth, and condensed in an anthropogenic parallel to the Big Crunch —a proposed version of the death of the universe where all matter shrinks and condenses together. Workers are paid unlivable wages in more than a dozen countries to make this product possible. Then it’s sold by Apple, the world’s first trillion-dollar company, for $159 USD.

The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine them. As they work, humans breathe in airborne particles, which deposit in their lungs. The materials are shipped from places like Vietnam, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, and India, to factories in China. A literal city of workers creates four tiny computing chips and assembles them into a logic board. Sensors, microphones, grilles, and an antenna are glued together and packaged into a white, strange-looking plastic exoskeleton.

But more than a pair of headphones, AirPods are an un-erasable product of culture and class. People in working or impoverished economic classes are responsible for the life-threatening, exhaustive, violent work of removing their parts from the ground and assembling them. Meanwhile, people in the global upper class design and purchase AirPods.

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, which does electronics teardowns and sells repair tools and parts, told Motherboard that AirPods are “evil.” According to the headphones review team at Rtings.com , AirPods are "below-average" in terms of sound quality. According to people on every social media platform, AirPods are a display of wealth.

Mark Henny, the head of headphone reviews for Rtings.com, said that the AirPods offer a lot of value for the price point despite a rating of "below average" sound quality. “You also have much cheaper models, but for the quality of the craftsmanship of the AirPods, from the case to the actual earbuds, and also for the reliable wireless connection, the battery life—the price of the AirPods is actually pretty fair,” Henny told Motherboard.

AirPods aren’t the most expensive pair of wireless earbuds on the market. Some luxury wireless earbuds cost upwards of $730 . Other companies like Sennheiser sell wireless earbuds for $300 . Bose sells its pair for about $200 .

Even if you only own AirPods for a few years, the earth owns them forever. When you die, your bones will decompose in less than a century , but the plastic shell of AirPods won’t decompose for at least a millennia . Thousands of years in the future, if human life or sentient beings exist on earth, maybe archaeologists will find AirPods in the forgotten corners of homes. They’ll probably wonder why they were ever made, and why so many people bought them. But we can also ask ourselves those same questions right now.

Part of the joke may have to do with the fact that AirPods are, well, tiny. They’re incredibly easy to lose, or accidentally launder with your clothes. By virtue of their size alone, AirPods are a risky purchase. AirPods communicate that you can afford to buy them, but also lose them.

There’s an irony here, since you can’t ethically or practically repair, recycle, or throw away AirPods. They’re two small, untethered objects that hang from a person's ear and are designed to be worn at any time—especially when you’re commuting, walking, or exercising. Lots of people lose their AirPods.

But let’s say you don’t lose your AirPods, and instead, you throw them in the trash when they stop holding their charge. The AirPods don’t just go away. They become someone else’s problem. Then, long after you’re dead, AirPods will still be sitting, and not decomposing, in the crust of the earth.

Owning AirPods embodies what it means to be “rich” in the same way as this picture of Kanye West haphazardly holding his laptop.

Before, the idea of expendable wealth was limited to the likes of multimillionaires like West. But now, AirPods have normalized the idea that anyone can demonstrate expendable wealth to the world. If you’re “courageous” enough to invest in a pair of AirPods, there’s a sense that losing them is not a big deal. On TikTok, this sentiment fueled a meme in which people pretend to flush their AirPods down the toilet.

Another common AirPod meme is some iteration of “Oh my god, they have AirPods in, they can’t hear us, oh my god,” featuring a picture of someone approaching a life-ending situation. The joke suggests that people who wear AirPods act as if they’re celebrities, detached and elevated from their environment, and too good to listen to those around them. In reality, AirPods have pretty poor noise isolation (Rtings.com gave AirPods a grim score of 3.6 out of 10 on that quality.)