Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as TrapsThis article, in a special issue of the Journal of Material Culture edited by Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Chloe Nahum-Claudel, explores a tendency among the makers of recommender systems to describe their purpose as “hooking” people, enticing them into frequent or enduring usage. Anthropological theories about animal trapping prove useful for thinking about how these systems embody models of their users and sit within broader infrastructural ecologies of knowledge and technology.