If you get new socks, you can keep the old ones or throw them out. Likewise for your underwear, your shirts, your pants, your entire wardrobe. Same goes for the pots in your kitchen, the phone in your pocket, even the vehicles in your garage. There is virtually nothing in your life that, when it gets old, needs updating or you just feel like a new version, you don't have the option of hanging on to or disposing of by one means or another.
Except the wires in your house.
While the watchwords of technological progress are "computing" and "cell" and of late "AI," perhaps one of the most foundational is "wireless." We have come to expect that almost any device we use is available in a form factor where it can go anywhere untethered. For power there are batteries, rechargeable and one-shot, while for connectivity there is WiFi and Bluetooth in multiple flavors. For sure, wires are still needed to go from the centers of the universe, be they power plants or data centers, to our own bases of operations. But once there what we need is packed into cells or tossed into the ether, waiting to be accessed as needed. As time goes on each is getting stronger and faster and increasing capacity, enabling us to go further and further from our own mothership for longer periods of time.
That means that the infrastructure that took it the last mile is now obsolete. No need to plug in a strip of rubber encased copper to make that final connection. In many cases you couldn't do that even if you wanted to: more and more devices are doing away with headphone jacks, network connections and even dedicated power ports. Wire-less might more correctly be called wire-none.
They were all necessary and essential at one time. Electrical to be sure, but also telephone, TV antenna, cable, intercom and more. Each was carefully installed by the original builder, a licensed professional or maybe even you. Each made perfect sense when it was put in, enabling appliances to power up or speakers to be heard. Wall plates were matched to décor, while any extensions were carefully nestled along baseboards to be as invisible as possible.
But now? A look in your basement or closet or under your desk reveals a rat's nest of wires in different colors that used to be the circulatory system that connected you to the outside world. Now they sit fallow and forlorn, terminating in a forgotten menagerie of connectors, carrying nothing at best, decaying at worst. Were it any other aspect of your life, you would rip them out by the root, clear cut them to the bone, and toss them out or offer the best to charity.
Not so here. The reasons vary. For one, they were likely installed in such a way that to pull them out would result in collateral damage. Unless you fancy repairing and repainting a strip of wall, better to just leave the wall plate as is and put a vase in front of it. And perhaps more alarming, it's possible that the butterfly effect of cutting a single seemingly useless wire might result in your entire system becoming unstable.
I offer myself as an object lesson. On the outside wall of our family room is a bundle of wires that used to traffic sound to speakers inside and outside. Useless now, they were replaced with small Bluetooth versions that can go anywhere. I could, rather should cut them and spackle the holes. Yet I don't, as I'm no longer sure what they are actually connected to. Meanwhile, in our basement there is a central point where all the old phone wires come in, a rainbow of coated copper that provided multiple lines. Obsolete since we switched to fiber years ago, I should be able to rip it all out with no effect. But I am afraid, very afraid, of the unintended consequences of a little tidying up.
At some point we will sell our house and the new owners will come in and start fresh. Good for them. But until that time our walls shall remain intact with their contents slowly decaying within, testament to ancient technologies that required Point A to be connected to Point B. Rather than take a chance, I will leave it all alone, treating it as a shrine to some long-forgotten deity I don't wish to anger.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford installed cable connections never used. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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