Ryan Hendrickson
@imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
1.6K followers 5.5K following 570 posts
"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
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
caseynewton.bsky.social
Wrote about fresh signs of an AI bubble (and why the industry says the worries are mostly overblown) www.platformer.news/ai-bubble-20...
We have entered the "weird financial tricks" phase of the bubble. A reliable indicator of bubbles is that companies concoct bizarre financial instruments and accounting measures to paper over their problems. In Fortune, Allie Garfinkel reports that venture capitalists are irked at some of the creative accounting going on in their portfolios. Some startups are reporting one-time sales as "recurring revenue." Others technically show "recurring revenue" for what are essentially trials.

And that's on the tame side. For crazy, you can look to Robinhood's suggestion that it might offer "tokenized" equity in OpenAI. By "tokenized," Business Insider reports, Robinhood means "blockchain-enabled representations of securities like stocks." In reality, they have no connection to OpenAI equity whatsoever. But that doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be able to gamble on the mirage!
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
justinhendrix.bsky.social
"The deals also involve circular arrangements between the world’s most valuable start-up and its partners, as well as complex financing terms that have in most cases yet to be agreed."
A vertical flow-style diagram showing relationships among major tech companies. At the top is the OpenAI logo, with arrows pointing to and from various other companies below. These include SoftBank, Oracle, NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Microsoft, Broadcom, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Amazon. Arrows indicate funding, partnership, or supply-chain connections between them, such as NVIDIA connecting to CoreWeave, Google connecting to Meta, and Amazon connecting to Anthropic. The diagram suggests a web of interconnections among these companies around AI development and infrastructure.
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
justinhendrix.bsky.social
Also recommend this article:

bsky.app/profile/just...
justinhendrix.bsky.social
"OpenAI has signed about $1tn in deals this year for computing power to run its artificial intelligence models, commitments that dwarf its revenue and raise questions about how it can fund them."
OpenAI’s computing deals top $1tn
Partners including Nvidia, AMD and Oracle have signed up to Sam Altman’s huge bet on the future of artificial intelligence
www.ft.com
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
justinhendrix.bsky.social
Important article for anyone following AI and AI policy.

"In the process, [NVIDIA and OpenAI are] now seen as playing a key role in ratcheting up the risks of a possible AI bubble by inflating the market and binding the fates of numerous companies together. "
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
NVIDIA and OpenAi:

Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“

@bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
I don’t use this term lightly but this is satanically evil
alexzee.bsky.social
Apropos of nothing, Sec. Kristi Noem is currently praying over Burgerville with Portland ICE officials.
A screenshot of a video of Noem praying at a conference table with other people wearing suits. Fast food bags and water bottles sit on the table.
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
ryanboyd.bsky.social
You probably can’t make very good art if you can purchase your way out of annoying life things like grocery checkout lines or a crowded bus
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
tomscocca.bsky.social
It's not just that they're going to strike down a law against conversion therapy, it's that they're going to do it on behalf of made-up claims from a straw plaintiff who can't honestly show the law affected her at all
tomscocca.bsky.social
One thing about American's widespread distrust and disapproval of the Supreme Court is that mainstream news coverage mostly doesn't dwell on stuff like standing, so people don't even begin to grasp how rigged the Court truly is www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10...
Supreme Court Live Updates: Justices Seem Set to Rule Against Colorado’s Ban on Conversion Therapy
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
threnody.bsky.social
the article in the QT is solid & if you’re cis & don’t get exactly how grim headlines like “supreme court poised to overturn conversion therapy ban,” please know that the international council for the rehabilitation of torture victims (ICRT) considers conversion therapy torture.

because it is.
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Seeing people saying Weiss et al don't know what they're doing and will kill CBS but I feel like this is just the logical endpoint of social media platforms becoming the main source of truth about the world for millions of people. Nice to think the Internet wouldn't eat reality, but it did
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
"The news" as journalists reporting on and contextualizing factual happenings has been replaced by "the news" as promoting/reacting to content creators like the US gov, billionaires, and genocidaires. In this info environment I think the Ellison-ized CBS will probably do great
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
This is something I wish my AI-cheerleading colleagues in archives and libraries fully understood: all the work we've done in the past 25+ years, all of it, is now actively being used to putting us out of business in the most dire fashion imaginable by the wealthiest people on the planet
bildoperationen.bsky.social
So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed
quoproquid.bsky.social
have just come across a YouTube account that has been using Sora to upload reels of fake, AI-generated “90s sitcoms” every few hours
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
drleonj.bsky.social
I spent the day looking at applications for licenses to deal second hand goods, which were required in Boston in 1839, and was struck by how many were on blue paper. Made from coarse rags dyed with indigo, they form a sort of class-based material vernacular. No rich person used paper this color 🗃️
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
gbbranstetter.bsky.social
ADF has a track record of representing clients with just-so standing claims, like wedding businesses that are incorporated just long enough to challenge nondiscrimination laws protecting queer couples and are never heard from again
mjsdc.bsky.social
I'm sorry but how does this person have standing to challenge Colorado's ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy when she has explicitly disclaimed any desire to change a patient's sexual orientation or gender identity? How is this a real case? slate.com/news-and-pol...
The Supreme Court’s First Blockbuster Case This Term Looks Pretty Fake
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case that seeks to undo a major triumph of the LGBTQ+ movement.
slate.com
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) back to back and they both felt eerily prophetic. I don't want to spoil anything so if you're in the mood for some supremely bad/creepy vibes in October I gotta recommend them
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Believe me when I tell you that a lot of people are hanging on by their fingernails and services like the food bank are one of the only lifelines they have left. Hate to say it can get worse but add mass hunger to the current equation and, well -
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
It's wild to see a person who is so clearly and obviously our contemporary analogue to MLK, Jr., Desmond Tutu, Mandela, etc. be treated with sneering condescension by liberals and rabid urges of sexualized violence on the right. A clear indication of how morally stunted the US is now
dropsitenews.com
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg raised her fist as she and about 160 other Global Sumud Flotilla participants arrived in Greece to roaring cheers. Crowds welcomed them after their release from illegal Israeli detention.

Greta later addressed supporters — her remarks are below.
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
gbbranstetter.bsky.social
I'm also reminded of the "whistleblower" report about abuses at a Missouri gender clinic, the author of which is now just a full-time anti-transgender lobbyist, that fell apart the moment any reporter tried to verify it
jamellebouie.net
perhaps the biggest story TFPever ran was a catastrophically shoddy argument that George Floyd ackshully died of an overdose. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the piece was simply wrong, Weiss didn’t take it down, she asked her critic, @radleybalko.bsky.social, to come on a podcast.
maxtani.bsky.social
David Ellison’s note to staff on Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
I hope this is a wake up call for folks up here in the Northeast: the federal government is arguing that it can legally coup your governor using the national guard as the President's private army, under a completely fictional pretext. The health care pact is nice but maybe not enough
nicholasgrossman.bsky.social
If U.S. states have any degree of sovereignty, if there’s any states’ rights at all, it is the right not to be invaded by the armed forces of another U.S. state.
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
For you history buffs out there imagine a timeline where Roy Cohn is put in charge of CBS and Edward R. Murrow is deported to a black site
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
It's no exaggeration to say that "whiteness" as a concept has been disastrous, possibly to the point of extinction in the near future, for human civilization, though saying so too loudly and often can actually get you killed in the twenty first century
elmcitytree.blacksky.app
James Baldwin to Angela Davis in 1970, discussing white Americans:
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness— for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps-they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of-and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
this is the key: "policy" outside law, aka fascism
joshuajfriedman.com
DOJ: CA NG is already federalized

Judge: You are an officer of the court. Do you think this is an appropriate way to deal with my order? Appropriate way of dealing with ruling you disagree with?

DOJ: Well, I'm not a policy maker

Judge: You're a lawyer