The memo is the core primitive of 📝MythOS: a short, living record that captures evolving thought for human readers while serving as a machine-readable node that AI systems can retrieve and traverse.
The name follows the dictionary sense. In 📝Brian Swichkow's words, "A memo is defined as a memorandum or short note," and he chose it because it means "an informal record, a written reminder, record of communication." The lexicon entry for 📝memo covers the word itself; this entry covers what the form does inside the platform.
The memo sits between a note, a document, a journal entry and a knowledge artifact. "It's a doc, but it's not a doc the way most people think about it," in Brian's words. He contrasts it with the blog post: "Blog posts are inherently static… they're not considered something that evolves." A memo is meant to stay revisable and expandable, a 📝Living Document rather than a frozen artifact, and its informality is deliberate, because thought develops incrementally and associatively.
The memo works on two layers at once. For people, it is an evolving knowledge object and a container for narrative and ideas. For search engines and language models, it is a node in a knowledge graph, linked to other memos through each 📝Mention, which Brian ties to the preference those systems show for 📝Networked Thought.
Because a memo can represent anything, a library builds outward from it: Brian describes memos for books, podcasts, companies, founders, articles and collaborators, all interconnected. That makes the memo the abstraction through which MythOS unifies journaling, publishing, AI interaction, contextual retrieval and identity mapping.
I chose "memo" because it means an informal record, a written reminder. That informality is the point: a blog post is finished once it's published, while a memo keeps evolving and keeps connecting.