Ryan Hendrickson
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson
@imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
"You ever feel like nothin' good was ever gonna happen to you?"
"Yeah, and nothing did. So what?"
Archivist at Boston University for ~25 years, he/they
https://www.imaginaryhistories.com
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
"The CIA has denied the allegations of brutality among the units, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda...However, USCIS used a Human Rights Watch report decrying the units as a reason to deny US citizenship to an Afghan soldier who had worked alongside American forces"
November 28, 2025 at 1:43 AM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
"In perceiving and experiencing the world, we ‘smuggle in’ our own fundamental self-survival goals. This is something we share with cats and worms and viruses. Whether this is also something we share with artificial systems is another story."
- @annaciaunica.bsky.social
What if thinking doesn’t begin in the brain, but in the ceaseless labour of our cells? Today’s essay rethinks the question of how we become minds, arguing that cognition begins not in the mind but in the collective processes that keep a body alive @annaciaunica.bsky.social
Why you need your whole body – from head to toes – to think | Aeon Essays
Contemplating the world requires a body, and a body requires an immune system: the rungs of life create the stuff of thought
buff.ly
November 27, 2025 at 12:36 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
Gonna be a *lot* of inedible and dangerous dishes and at least one family annihilation as a result of people casually asking chatgpt for a recipe
November 25, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
i think it's also pretty bad faith to pretend every criticism is invalid because some people are upset this stuff is being forced on them at work while threatening the stability of the entire economy and being used to create the hard right federal government's propaganda machine
November 26, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
What makes my head combust is how many conversations I had with self satisfied American and British and Western European ‘liberals’ etc over the past decade on the global threat posed by Indian fascism, and how easily they all dismissed it. Because it couldn’t possibly impact them, as they saw it
November 25, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Insane considering the US has been an oil exporter for several years now. Having this much oversupply might be a liability as our existing reserves would depreciate and the petrodollar gets weaker
Not beating the “America invades countries to grab their oil” allegations
Rep. Salazar on Venezuela: "We're about to go in ... we need to go in ... Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day"
November 24, 2025 at 10:25 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
see also 'if your AI created revenge porn of underage girls we're treating it as if your CEO personally created and sent CSAM'
see also 'if your AI hit a kid and dragged them 500 feet in your self driving car we're treating it as if your CEO was personally behind the wheel and texting during it'
maybe we just say 'if your AI said it we're treating it as if your CEO said it to their face' for the purposes of liability
November 24, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
see also 'if your AI hit a kid and dragged them 500 feet in your self driving car we're treating it as if your CEO was personally behind the wheel and texting during it'
maybe we just say 'if your AI said it we're treating it as if your CEO said it to their face' for the purposes of liability
The fact that the bot told this kid that rope is “the most classic” method for hanging yourself is insane

www.yahoo.com/news/article...
November 24, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
maybe we just say 'if your AI said it we're treating it as if your CEO said it to their face' for the purposes of liability
November 24, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
It's also pretty myopic and wrong though: who is this Zohran Mamdani character who just went to the Oval Office and said that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza? Where did he come from? Who campaigned for him and elected him?
November 24, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
The way this is written is peak New York Times: they're using the law enforcement exonerative to describe how universities and the institutional democratic party came together to violently beat pro-justice and anti-genocide protesters to a pulp.
I think @brendannyhan.bsky.social is exactly right in this piece, but I’d go one step further here. Elites very explicitly told young people to sit down and shut up. Society punished them for standing up for their beliefs, and targeted and vilified the organizers. Now we need need them.
November 24, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
Anyway, my take here is that young people already know that they don't live in a democracy and so their forms of political participation will reflect that: a shift to local politics and direct action. Not buying the idea that they're demoralized so much as better informed about where protest leads.
November 24, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
I kind of remember when this came out finding the results a bit odd, but with hindsight it’s easy to see how it was designed to flatter the expectations of the business class.
November 22, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
It’s really cool watching people on this website cry about how anti-technology and progress the world is re: AI and hearing, from the small number of instructors I know in real life, how this stuff is just destroying traditional instruction with no effective mitigation for public education systems.
My students don’t even bother to remove “ChatGPT said…” from their assignments half the time…

We are doomed.
November 21, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Post-war suburb explosion was a product of mass self-segregation by race & class in a specific post-war environment that already was ebbing by the late 70s, that original momentum is completely gone & demography is rationalizing, though with resistance from the conservatism born of those suburbs
I think the debate over what people "want" is a distraction given two basic facts:
1) America vastly over-provides suburbs and under-provides dense walkability;
2) Suburbs are hideously bad for the environment and harmful to numerous markers of well-being.

That's enough! We should do more density!
as will notes, people tend to *say* they want suburban living. they want a big house and a big yard and etc. this is not however what is suggested by their actual purchasing practices, which invariably result in something like this:

raincitymaps.com/maps/inspect...
November 20, 2025 at 6:14 PM
This kind of thing alone would crash the AI bubble if we didn't live in a profoundly misogynistic culture
This is a nuts story. An AI chatbot and image platform left millions of images exposed. They show what people are actually using the AI for: taking random women's yearbook, graduation, and social media photos and making super realistic hardcore porn with them
www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...
Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn
Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...
www.404media.co
November 19, 2025 at 3:47 PM
As an archivist: it's a powerful example of how history has no absolute/inherent moral or epistemological authority - it's constantly being refashioned and remodulated to serve The Nation/The Ideology as needed. How do you 'fact check' a foundational mythology used to justify abysmal horrors
I'm struck by this clip of former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz saying Holocaust education has backfired in part because people Palestinians as victims: "They think the lesson of the Holocaust is…you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people."

www.reddit.com/r/JewsOfCons...
From the JewsOfConscience community on Reddit: Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz speaking to the Jewish Federation and lamenting that young people are learning the wrong lessons from Holocaust e...
Explore this post and more from the JewsOfConscience community
www.reddit.com
November 19, 2025 at 3:42 PM
Think it's a bit weird that the Epstein files are rightly a huge scandal but going mostly ignored is how AI tech is being used right this moment to generate literally unimaginable amounts of CSAM with almost zero media coverage and no gov oversight
November 19, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Credit default swaps... now there's a phrase I haven't heard in years...
November 18, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
not gonna lie, there is something luridly fascinating about this trend towards the primacy of texture over shape that's emerged as a result, like the direct representation of the inchoate nostalgia that's fueling so much of our modern race-to-the-bottom politically
This mural has gone up in Kingston, ostensibly for Christmas but AI has ensured it's actually to celebrate the return of our dark lord Cthulhu
November 18, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
this but for every university endowment that we can make the new cover of their reports on integrating AI everywhere
Harvard's endowment now has almost $443 million invested in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF
November 18, 2025 at 12:08 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
I have said this for awhile: the democratic party’s general unwillingness to allow healthy dissent on the issue of Palestine will allow the fascists to “get ahead” on the issue because the antisemitic groyper faction is tolerated in the party and allowed to dissent.
July 29, 2025 at 3:25 AM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
The Epstein scandal has always been a scandal about the ruling class as a whole, not one individual or political party.

Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together.
Epstein’s emails are the end of America as they ruined it
If the evil banality of the world's most powerful people exposed in the Epstein emails doesn't cause a revolution, nothing will.
www.inquirer.com
November 16, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
This is like after 9/11 when George Bush made sure all his KSA buds got to leave the nation while all americans were grounded, except for pedophiles lol
November 17, 2025 at 1:19 AM
So Trump’s going to do Iraq II in Venezuela to distract from Epstein?
November 17, 2025 at 1:22 AM