[...] Given Bourdieu's central role in developing practice theory, it would be surprising for him to suddenly come down on the side of structural determinism, arguing that people are simply recipients of large-scale social forces. Instead, Bourdieu's theory of taste hinges on his understanding of the habitus - the set of embodied dispositions that people acquire as they are socialized and that they exercise when making judgments of taste (among other things). For Bourdieu, the concept of habitus provides an alternative to visions of people as either free-willed autonomous subjects or unthinking vehicles of structural dynamics (see Sterne 2003, 376). People acquire the sensibilities that constitute their habitus in worlds full of the myriad entities Hennion describes: a person's taste in music is going to be shaped by how the people around them act, the forms they encounter music in, and a host of other situational factors. Because people in similar social positions grow up under similar conditions, they end up with a similar habitus, and the mystery of how tastes come to mirror social structure is at least partly resolved (Lizardo 2014, 346).

Conventional ways of thinking about access mislead researchers into thinking that, once they have cracked through the black box's wall, knowledge will be waiting there for the taking. But access is not an event; it is the ongoing navigation of relationships. Access has a texture, and this texture -- patterns of disclosure and refusal -- can be instructive in itself. When I interviewed junior employees, they were often worried about what they were allowed to say to me, even when I had signed the same nondisclosure agreements they had. In contrast, CEOs and founders usually spoke quite freely, sure in their ability to define the parameters of the permissible and to draw the corporation's limits into strict, punishing existence at will. The social structure of the firm shimmered into view through these interactions.

Chapter 6, "Parks and Recommendation," builds on that discussion of space by examining a set of spatial metaphors commonly used by the makers of music recommendation: pastoral metaphors that figure technical workers as gardeners or park rangers who tend to the music space and the listeners who travel within it. Many critics have argued that such metaphors naturalize the work of machine learning, mystifying how it actually works. I offer a different interpretation, suggesting that developers find pastoral metaphors useful because they describe an ambivalent form of control: while the people who manage the music space are aware that they determine a good deal of its structure, they also understand their work as tending to lively data sources beyond their influence. Analyzing these metaphors helps us interpret how the makers of music recommendation think about their power and responsibility in relation to the objects of their labor and to music more generally.