Liam Cole Young

Liam Cole Young is a media theorist who studies how technical histories of data, information, and infrastructure intersect with cultural histories of music, film, sports, and administration.

He researches and teaches across a range of topics and periods—from early modern double-entry bookkeeping and state bureaucracies to 20th century pop music and box office charts; from logistical media of ports, shipping containers, and barcodes to the history and rise of sports gambling; from Y2K and the first dotcom crash to the cod fisheries and fur trade of the 17th and 18th centuries; from financialization and blockchain bro culture to common salt and human hands as media of culture. In each case, he is interested primarily in questions of epistemology (how we know about these things) and infrastructure (how they are built into and operate in the world).

His first book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017; Open Access) explored such themes by tracing the list as a cultural technique of administration and imagination. His current book project is on the history of salt and positions sodium chloride as a medium of culture and civilization. He is also developing a long-term project on sports gambling, datafication, and financialization.