By now, you know the story. Tesla magically (remotely) updated the software of its cars during Hurricane Irma:
Tesla remotely sent a free software update to some drivers across Florida over the weekend, extending the battery capacity of cars and giving extra range to those fleeing Hurricane Irma.
According to reports, the update temporarily unlocked the full-battery potential for 75-kilowatt-hour Model S sedans and Model X SUVs, adding around 30 to 40 miles to their range.
“Cars with a 75-kilowatt-hour battery pack were previously software limited to 210 miles of driving range per single charge and will now get 249 miles, the full range capacity of the battery,” the company wrote on a blog.
As is evident from this description, the software regulating battery life is ‘autonomous’ of the user; the user cannot change it, or tweak it in any way to reflect changing user needs or driving conditions (like, say, the need to drive to a distant point in order to escape a potentially life-threatening change in the weather.) In short, the software that runs on Tesla’s cars is not ‘free‘–not in the sense that you have to pay money for it, but in the sense that you cannot do what you, as the user of the software, might or might not want to do with it: like share it, copy it, modify it. If the user needs ‘help’ he or she must wait for the benevolent corporation to come to its aid.
We, as software users, are used to this state of affairs. Most of the software we use is indeed not ‘free’ in this sense: the source code is kept a trade secret and cannot be inspected to figure out how it does what it does, the binary executables are copyrighted and cannot be copied, lastly, the software’s algorithms are patented. You cannot read the code, you cannot change it to better reflect your needs, and you cannot make copies of something you ‘own’ to give it to others who might need it. As software users eventually come to realize, you don’t ‘own’ proprietary software in the traditional sense of the term, you license it for a limited period of time, subject to many constraints, some reasonable, others not.
In an interview with 3AM magazine, while talking about my book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software I had made note of some of the political implications of the way software is regulated by law. The following exchange sums up the issues at play:
3:AM: One aspect of the book that was particularly interesting to me was your vision of a world full of code, a cyborg world where ‘distinctions between human and machine evanesce’ and where ‘personal and social freedoms in this domain are precisely the freedoms granted or restricted by software.’ Can you say something about what you argued for there?
SC: I think what we were trying to get at was that it seemed the world was increasingly driven by software, which underwrote a great deal of the technology that extends us and makes our cyborg selves possible. In the past, our cyborg selves were constructed by things like eyeglasses, pencils, abacuses and the like—today, by smartphones, wearable computers, tablets and other devices like them. These are all driven by software. So our extended mind, our extended self, is very likely to be largely a computational device. Who controls that software? Who writes it? Who can modify it? Look at us today, tethered to our machines, unable to function without them, using software written by someone else. How free can we be if we don’t have some very basic control over this technology? If the people who write the software are the ones who have exclusive control over it, then I think we are giving up some measure of freedom in this cyborg society. Remember that we can enforce all sorts of social control over people by writing it into the machines that they use for all sorts of things. Perhaps our machines of tomorrow will come with porn filters embedded in the code that we cannot remove; perhaps with code in the browsers that mark off portions of the Net as forbidden territory, perhaps our reading devices will not let us read certain books, perhaps our smartphones will not let us call certain numbers, perhaps prosthetic devices will not function in ‘no-go zones’, perhaps the self-driving cars of tomorrow will not let us drive faster than a certain speed; the control possibilities are endless. The more technologized we become and the more control we hand over to those who can change the innards of the machines, the less free we are. What are we to do? Just comply? This all sounds very sci-fi, but then, so would most of contemporary computing to folks fifty years ago. We need to be in charge of the machines that we use, that are our extensions.
We, in short, should be able to hack ourselves.
Tesla’s users were not free during Irma; they were at the mercy of the company, which in this case, came to their aid. Other users, of other technologies, might not be so fortunate; they might not be the masters of their destiny.
Samir Chopra 
There is a difference in the objects (technology) with which we are involved, but I don’t think much has changed if our being human with technology.
If I had a covered wagon and a wheel broke, I might be able to fashion a new wagon wheel, but I would be constrained by the design of the wagon. I could not, say, put a square wheel on it. Or a 15 foot diameter wheel on it.
The difference now a days seems not so much that we are somehow giving something up of ourselves, but that we are conditioning our thoughts and ideas about technology in a manner that is concordant with the technology of our time.
The questions or concerns that you have is of a person who is knowledgable where that is involved in the intricacies of particular type knowledge he that is complex in a certain manner. Just as win the automobile was invented I’m sure people had their concerns, but most people just thought it was a cool thing to ride around and have fun and get from place to place quicker. One can’t even argue that the automobile did not increase our freedom but actually limited us to a certain type of freedom, a certain definition of freedom in comparison to the type of human life that we had before the automobile.
I don’t think there’s much difference except in as much as we want to see that somehow human beings are separate enough from the world that we are able to create novelty that wasn’t already involved in the functioning of the universe itself anyways. But yes that is a necessary kind of you if we are involved in any type of real activity; we have to approach it as if we are actually creating something new, our thoughts and ideas have to be understood in the context of novelty.
But likewise these concerns and fears about technology taking something human away from what is human, or removing freedom were once before there was freedom, that is all just speculation from a perspective of the past that is really not comprehending what history is, or humans relationship with history actually is.
I’m not sure but just because someone doesn’t know the code or the source code is owned and controlled by someone else that the state of human existence is any different than when an ironworker could forge a sword have a certain strengths that was better or stronger than an army that didn’t have that technology.
If I was a soldier with a bronze sword and someone came at me with an iron sword, there was no freedom lost or some sort of humanity lost in the fact that someone came up with a steel sword. One could argue that some sort of freedom was actually lost in the development of steel because now every battle had to be waged in that technological context.
We humans will deal with it, and the freedom I know and try to uphold will really have no basis for understanding except as a nostalgia in the future.
Oops. Auto corrects. Can. Not can’t. “One can even argue…”
Sam, can anyone EVER claim that he is “master of his own destiny”? Come on mate!