We have no shortage of explanations that place the blame at the foot of capitalism itself: in the ceaseless production of desire that capital demands. The musicologist Eric Drott (2018c, 333), for instance, convincingly argues that the promotional materials for music streaming services "transfigure plenitude into a form of lack." These services provide users access to the catalog, and then suggest that the size of the catalog is a problem that they can solve for those same users, keeping the wheels of capital moving. The cultural critic Jonathan Cohn (2018, so) follows a similar line of reasoning, arguing that recommender systems operate in "bad faith," framing choice as a "burden" to be relieved rather than as the location of users' agency, which recommendations diminish.

These explanations are not wrong; they reach for large-scale dynamics of desire and production. But they do not capture the local reasoning of people working on these systems, who feel the reality of overload in their everyday lives and come to understand their work as a form of care for users who are similarly beset by the paradox of choice. If we want to understand the logic of people working in these systems, we cannot reduce their efforts at understanding the world to "bad faith" or the epiphenomena of capitalist machinery. This does not mean that the makers of music recommendation can't be wrong about themselves, their users, or the cultural dynamics they try to understand. They may indeed be caught up in large-scale processes in which their ultimate function is the ongoing production of consumer desire. But the political economy of the music industry does not directly determine how people working in these settings make decisions or think about their work.

My goal here is to understand how recommender systems make sense to their makers -- how they work, who they're for, why they exist. To do this, we need to understand overload. Overload haunts the utopian fantasies of the information age, lurking beneath dreams of exponential growth and threatening to turn computing's successes into failures. It feels real, it feels new, and it feels tightly bound up with contemporary technologies of media circulation. And yet as we've already seen, its newness is old. What seemed like a natural response to on-demand streaming in the 2010s also seemed like a natural response to the ocean of CDs in the 1990s.