Memos by Brian Swichkow

Relational Sovereignty in Agentic Collaboration
Relational sovereignty in agentic collaboration is the doctrine that every party in a human–AI partnership — human or agent — keeps a verified relationship with its own state before and during...
The Context That Grew Back: Teaching an Agent System to Tend Itself
Sixteen and a half thousand characters. Three weeks earlier this memo had been five and a half, and I had personally spent a week of no coding sessions cutting it and every document like it down to...
Steward Every System as a Living One
Every system we steward carries the same standing goal: Steward every system as a living one: parts that serve the whole, frugal by instinct, regenerating what they learn, open to feedback, symbiotic...
Dealroom Media
Dealroom Media is a marketing services company founded in 2024 in New York that generates sales pipeline for startups through executive-led LinkedIn content. The firm ghostwrites posts for founders...
Thea Swichkow
Thea, short for Promethea, is my 2021 Ducati Streetfighter V4. She is the younger sister of Jessica, my 2012 Ducati Streetfighter 848 which was with me for 3 years and 25k miles. While I'd yearned...
Ethan
Ethan was a messaging app for messaging Ethan, the creator of the Ethan app. Ethan, Product Hunt Ethan — March 2015 Snapshot, Wayback Machine
Michael Jenkins
Michael Jenkins is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and research engineer who founded Influential Films, a Santa Monica production company, in 2018. A cinematographer, video producer, and 3D-scan...
MillCross Coffee
MillCross Coffee Bar & Kitchen is a dual-concept café at 11050 Washington Blvd in Culver City, CA that runs as a coffee bar and kitchen by day and becomes La Sabina Wine Bar in the evening. The...
Lara Vandenberg
Lara Vandenberg is a New York-based founder and CEO of Assemble, a managed workforce platform that helps marketing organizations source, assemble, and operate senior freelance talent at scale —...
Shamus Madan
Shamus Madan is the New York-based founder of Dealroom Media, a marketing services company that generates sales pipeline for startups through executive-led LinkedIn content. A Villanova School of...
My Sticky Wall
My Sticky Wall, also known as My Storyteller Consciousness, is a visual representation of the stories I'm telling myself. It's a fun-ctional art piece in My Studio/ADU and takes over the largest wall...
The LADWP Bill-Dispute Playbook: How to Cut Your Bill and Claw Back Overcharges
TL;DR The single biggest lever is a formal meter-read/billing-error dispute, because that is the only path that produces retroactive credits. Remote "smart" meters can still fall back to estimated...
Reddit's ChatGPT Citation Collapse (August 2026)
Reddit's ChatGPT citation collapse is the abrupt August 2026 fall in how often ChatGPT attributed its answers to Reddit — from a stable share of roughly 3.8 percent of all tracked citations to under...
Why Reddit Dominates as an AI Source
Why Reddit Dominates as an AI Source — Reddit is the most structurally important user-generated content platform for AI, not because of what AI cites but because of what AI ingests. Google pays...
How Reddit's 'Authenticity Shockwave' Forged Its True Long-Term Value
The Authenticity Shockwave refers to the turning point triggered by Google's September 2025 deprecation of the &num=100 parameter — which stripped Reddit's surface SEO visibility while protecting its...
The Sentiment-Divergence Test
The sentiment-divergence test is a proposed method for measuring whether AI systems still reproduce community consensus, by querying categories where community opinion and official framing visibly...
Citation Share as a Proxy Metric
Citation share measures how often a domain appears as an attributed source in AI-generated answers. It is a proxy for influence over those answers, not a measurement of it. The gap between the two is...
UGC Deprioritization in AI Search
UGC deprioritization is the ongoing reduction in how much User Generated Content major AI systems surface and attribute in their answers, affecting social platforms broadly rather than any single...
Learning Source vs. Trust Source vs. Culture Source
Learning source, trust source, and culture source name three distinct roles a body of content can play for an Large Language Model (LLM): teaching it how people talk, giving it something to cite, and...
Dongming Yin
Dongming Yin is an entrepreneur, systems architect, and mathematical modeler working on AI automation and data infrastructure for supply chain and manufacturing. He is the founder of GAIA TECH, which...