A paradox is at play here: streaming services promise their users agency—namely, the ability to be curious, exploratory, and adventurous. Under the hood, though, they assume something else entirely—that, just as High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming would argue, you are what you like, and certain types of listeners will prefer certain types of music. The opposite is also thought to be true: those who prefer certain types of music are a certain type of listener. This paradox—perhaps unsurprisingly—is present throughout the history of science and technology.

As Jessica Riskin argues in her 2016 book The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, technology has always reflected preconceptions of what it means to be alive, blurring the distinction between a passive mechanism (a living being modeled as clockwork) and an active, restless being with its own agency. Similarly, algorithmic recommendation systems in music are built upon a long history of models that treat musical preference as indicators—symptoms, in effect—of listeners’ underlying traits. Listeners, in these systems, are not restless agents capable of free will.