The box arrived in two days, because of course it did.
Flashing lights, a name you can't pronounce, a promise of speeds that would make your old router weep.
You plugged it in, felt a small surge of pride, and went back to scrolling on a phone that was already fast enough.
Every couple of years, American households shell out two hundred dollars or more for a piece of plastic that sits in a corner blinking at us, and almost none of us could explain what it actually does.
The newest temptation is WiFi 7, the latest standard promising multi-gigabit speeds and "seamless" everything.
Most homes have internet plans that top out well below what WiFi 6 already delivers.
You are buying a fire hose to fill a Dixie cup.
Modern routers log every site visited, every device connected, every hour your teenager claims to be asleep.
Some manufacturers have admitted to selling anonymized browsing data.
Others bury the admission in a privacy policy longer than a mortgage.
We treat it as the cost of convenience, the price of living in the future.
But there was a time, not long ago, when the thing that connected your home to the world didn't also report back to a company that wanted to sell your habits to strangers.
Doorbells, thermostats, refrigerators, toothbrushes, all chirping away on a network most people set up once and never think about again.
A WiFi 7 router with its fancy management app becomes the front door to a house with no locks.
And the marketing works because we're exhausted.
We don't want to compare bands and channels and firmware vulnerabilities.
We want the box that promises faster, and we want to believe the promise because believing is easier than understanding.
The result is a country of people who own sophisticated surveillance equipment and call it a home improvement.
We joke about our phones listening to us.
We don't joke about the router, because we forget it's there.
There's a version of this where the technology is genuinely useful, where the speeds matter, where the security is real and not an afterthought.
But that version requires companies to compete on trust instead of numbers, and it requires the rest of us to pay attention to the blinking box in the corner.
The next standard is already being drafted.
Final Thoughts
We wired our homes for connection and somehow ended up wired for something else entirely.