In Defense of the Big Box of Cables

A blogger riffs on a viral social post from Tyler Gaw, who declared that after a decade of untouched cables finally proving useful, no one should ever be allowed to throw out their ‘Big Box of Cables.’ The sentiment struck a nerve with anyone who has ever dug through a tangle of legacy adapters and found exactly the obscure connector they needed.

Rather than just nod along, the author committed to the bit: they printed the post, cut it out, and taped it to the front of their own cable hoard — a bin his wife had labeled the ‘FAMILY TECHNO BOX.’ The idea is that the manifesto now serves double duty as motivation to keep adding cables and as a warning to any family member tempted to declutter.

Beneath the humor is a familiar tech-culture ethos: the pack-rat instinct that treats keeping old hardware as a virtue, not clutter. It’s a small, self-aware celebration of the tinkerer mindset — and a reminder that the payoff for hoarding, when it comes, feels like vindication.