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THE APPSMITHS: COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, AFFECT AND IDEOLOGY AMONG COCOA DEVELOPERS FROM NEXT TO IPHONE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy| by Hansen Hsu May 2015 © 2015 Hansen Hsu THE APPSMITHS: COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, AFFECT AND IDEOLOGY AMONG COCOA DEVELOPERS FROM NEXT TO IPHONE Hansen Hsu, Ph.D. Cornell University 2015 This dissertation is an ethnographic study, accomplished through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, of the cultural world of third party Apple software developers who use Apple’s Cocoa libraries to create apps. It answers the questions: what motivates Apple developers’ devotion to Cocoa technology, and why do they believe it is a superior programming environment? What does it mean to be a “good” Cocoa programmer, technically and morally, in the Cocoa community of practice, and how do people become one? I argue that in this culture, ideologies, normative values, identities, affects, and practices interact with each other and with Cocoa technology in a seamless web, which I call a “techno-cultural frame.” This frame includes the construction of a developer’s identity as a vocational craftsman, and a utopian vision of software being developed by millions of small-scale freelance developers, or “indies,” rather than corporations. This artisanal production is made possible by the productivity gains of Cocoa technology, which ironically makes indies dependent on Apple for tools. This contradiction is reconciled through quasi-religious narratives about Apple and Steve Jobs, which enrolls developers into seeing themselves as partners in a shared mission with Apple to empower users with technology. Although Cocoa helps make software production easier, it is not a deskilling technology but requires extensive learning, because its design heavily incorporates patterns unfamiliar to many programmers. These concepts can only be understood holistically after learning has been achieved, which means that learners must undergo a process of conversion in their mindset. This involves learning to trust that Cocoa will benefit developers before they fully understand it. Such technical and normative lessons occur at sites where Cocoa is taught, such as the training company Big Nerd Ranch. Sharing of technical knowledge and normative practices also occurs in the Cocoa community, online through blog posts, at local club meetings, and at conferences such as Apple’s WWDC, which help to enroll developers into the Cocoa techno-cultural frame. Apple’s relationship with developers is symbiotic, but asymmetrical, yet despite Apple’s coercive power, members of the Cocoa community can influence Apple’s policies. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Hansen Hsu received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. That year, he joined Apple, Inc. as a software engineer in the Mac OS 9 group. In 2000 he transferred to the Cocoa framework group within the Mac OS X division to work as a Quality Assurance Engineer, contributing to the releases of OS X 10.0 through 10.4 over the next five years. He left Apple in 2005 to study History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he received an M.A. in 2007. With this doctoral dissertation he completes his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. iii I dedicate this dissertation to my late mother, Wen Chen Hsu, who always believed in me. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people without whom I could not have finished this dissertation. I must first thank the members of my special committee, especially my chair, Trevor Pinch, who has been an enthusiastic supporter of me and my work from the moment I arrived at Cornell, provided a positive framework and environment that allowed me to succeed, and who I feel honored to have been taken under his guidance. Likewise, I thank Ronald Kline for being an interlocutor helping me to formulate a larger argument and reminding me to connect my work with key historical literatures, and for providing me with a teaching assistantship for his course, Inventing an Information Society, which provided new insights into my project. I thank Rachel Prentice for pushing me hard to think in new, difficult directions, which has greatly improved my work. Last but not least, special thanks must go to Phoebe Sengers, whose generous mentorship, encouragement, and support came at a critical juncture during the writing of the dissertation, and has always made herself available to me no matter how busy her schedule is. Phoebe is also responsible for getting me connected to the network of scholars in Culturally Embedded Computing (CemCom) and the Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for Social Computing, for providing me with funding through her ISTC grant, and for letting me work in the Goldman Social Computing Lab in Gates Hall. Each of my advisors has helped me in innumerous ways, intellectually and personally, and I could not have imagined a more perfect committee to work with. It has been a blessing to work with each and every one of them. I also wish to thank the many faculty of the Departments of Science & Technology Studies, Communication, Information Science, and Engineering who have provided help and support over the years. I especially thank Bruce Lewenstein, who despite his duties as Chair of the Department of Science & Technology Studies took the time to be the field appointed reader for my dissertation defense. I must also thank Steve Jackson, Tarleton Gillespie, Michael Lynch, Malte Ziewitz, Rebecca Slayton, Park Doing, Suman Seth, Stephen Hilgartner, Sara Pritchard, Peter Dear, Christine Leuenberger, Rachel Maines, and Judith Reppy, whose help and feedback have guided me throughout v my time at Cornell. I also thank the postdoctoral researchers and visiting scholars in S&TS with whom I have had the pleasure of interacting with, including Johanna Crane, Vivian Choi, Jenni Lieberman, and Annalisa Salonius. I thank the community of Cornell graduate students in Science & Technology Studies with whom I have had the privilege of being part of. My cohort, Tyson Vaughn, Anto Mohsin, and Ilil Naveh-Benjamin, has been with me from the beginning, and we have traveled this journey together. I must also thank the members of our dissertation support group, which has included Angie Boyce, Megan Halpern, and Hrönn Holmer. They have provided key emotional and intellectual support through the early stage of the dissertation writing process. I must credit Hrönn for coming up with the term “Appsmiths,” which I have used as the title of my dissertation. Other colleagues in Science & Technology Studies have been important friends over the years: Benjamin Wang, Kasia Tolwinski, Emma Zuroski, Ling-Fei Lin, Honghong Tinn, Nicole Nelson, Harald Kliems, Alexis Walker, Carmen Krol, Bahar Akyurtlu, Darla Thompson, Rob Schombs, Victor Marquez, Janet Vertesi, Lisa Onaga, Anna Geltzer, Hannah Rogers, Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, Katie Proctor, Owen Marshall, Shoan Yin Cheung, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Christopher Hesselbein, Danya Glabau, Jessy Price, Lisa Avron, Mehmet Ekinci, Jess Polk, and Ranjit Singh. I also thank my fellow Goldman labmates for their conversation and companionship, including Samir Passi, Stephanie Steinhardt, Laewoo (Leo) Kang, and Ishtiaque Ahmed, and the extended Cornell ISTC and CemCom family, including Kaiton Williams, Caroline Jack, Stephanie Santoso, Andreas Kuehn, Vera Khovanskya, Maggie Jack, Nick Knouf, Lucian Leahu, and Jofish Kaye. I also thank additional graduate student colleagues I have had the pleasure to work with at Cornell over the years, including Tony Liao, Matt Bernius, Stephen Purpura, Josh Braun, Dima Epstein, and Ellan Fei-Spero. I thank the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, for providing funding through a research assistantship, and additional funding for travel and audio transcription. I especially want to thank Mel Gregg at Intel, with whom I had key conversations that shaped my dissertation in the final stages. I also need to thank the vi Charles Babbage Institute, Thomas Misa and Jeffrey Yost for providing the Arthur L. Norberg Travel Fund Award in 2011, which allowed me to pursue archival research at the Institute. I thank as well the Special Interest Group, Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), for awarding me the MIT Press Travel Award in 2009 and the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies Information History Travel Award in 2010 to attend the SIGCIS session of SHOT, and I thank Thomas Haigh especially for working with me on my paper submissions to SIGCIS and being a generous and effective organizer of the group and the history of computing community. I also thank Atsushi Akera, Nathan Ensmenger, and Alex Bochannek for welcoming me into this community. I thank my advisors Wolf Schäfer, Iona Man-Cheong, and Don Ihde at Stony Brook University for teaching me how to be a scholar, and Cynthia Kauffman at De Anza College for providing me with the encouragement to pursue academia and leave my industry job. Without the generous time donated by the many Cocoa and iOS developers participating in my study, this project could not have been possible. I must thank most of all Aaron Hillegass, who gave me unfettered access to his company, the Big Nerd Ranch, where a significant proportion of the fieldwork for this dissertation was done. I also thank the many Big Nerd Ranch employees with whom I worked or interviewed for welcoming me into their lives, including Mikey Ward, Step Christopher, Emily Herman, Nate Chandler, Adam Preble, Joe Conway, Jeremy Sherman, Mark Dalrymple, Christian Keur, Brian Turner, Brian Hardy, Bill Phillips, Eric Jeffers, Owen Mathews, Steve Sparks, Bolot Kerimbaev, Jason Russell, Jami Siedler, Jaye Liptak, Stacy Moore, Agnes Mackintosh, Charles Brian Quinn, Mark Fenoglio, Chris Stewart, Andrew Lunsford, Alex Silverman, Brian Harper, Brandy Porter, James Majors, as well as Mark Sanchez and Michael Ledford of topsOrtho.