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https://natematias.com/portfolio/2025-08-22-unchaining-from-broken-software-tethers/>
"Last fall, just around the time I got the news that my neighbor Mark’s cancer
treatments were going well, I read an email that transformed my year. The oaks,
maples, and hickory trees across New York’s Finger Lakes were just changing
from summer green into autumn gold, and I had pulled my wool layers out of the
closet. On my way out the door, I often ran into my neighbors Mark and Pat, who
planted the apples and plums behind our home a decade earlier and taught me how
to prune them.
That’s when I got an email from Enel X Way, an Italian power company, that the
software in the boxes that charge our cars would be disconnected in just a few
short weeks. I immediately thought of Mark, whose medical care required
reliable travel to the nearby city of Syracuse. Across our entire neighborhood,
forty homes had exactly the same box, many supported by a New York State
electric charging grant. And now all of us were about to have tens of thousands
of dollars in critical infrastructure lose functionality - infrastructure we
relied on to get to work, access medical care, and live our daily lives.
How was it that a group of executives halfway across the world could, with a
single email, disrupt a whole community’s lives, and what could we do about it?
Over the next ten months, whether I liked it or not, I was about to gain a
lesson in infrastructure, law, electronics, and the power of collective action.
And this month, as my neighbors and I finally put this problem to rest, I’m
relieved to say that we have made ourselves much less dependent on the whims of
faraway companies.
This is a story about a Juicebox - not the waxed paper container of pressed
apples with a little straw that you drank in elementary school, but a high
voltage electrical device that charges electric cars. First designed for a
Kickstarter campaign in 2013, this box put home car charging within reach for
many people around the world. It plugs into a 30 amp supply like those used for
laundry machines and RVs at one end, and into your car on the other. Inside the
box is a collection of cables, a relay, and an electronics board. Software
inside the board talks to the car, records how much energy was used, and
implements safety protocols. It’s a simple piece of tech, and most of the cost
of making one is in the cables- thick bundles of copper that convey the power
needed to charge a car.
The story of how we freed our chargers from a delinquent company is also a
story about community - both the online community that rallied in collective
support for thousands of product owners, and the extraordinary neighbors of the
Ecovillage at Ithaca that I call home.
Here at the Ecovillage, our community of over 240 residents work together to
re-imagine our relationship with the planet and each other through our shared
infrastructure. So when we faced an emergency with our chargers, we handled it
like we handle every other problem: by working together on a solution."
Via Christoph S.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
