The last Blockbuster: what we really lose when video stores shut down

Lasts are nearly always nostalgic. The last of its species. The last of its kind. That sense of impending loss is also nearly always poignant in a way that firsts rarely are because passing into memory is its own kind of death. As technology and society change and grow, cultural artifacts necessarily move through this transition. They go from ubiquitous to nearly gone and then, finally, extinct. Things that seemed immutable are eventually revealed to be as easily displaced as the shifting sands