Ev Williams, the billionaire who co-founded Twitter and Medium, is sad. To fight that sadness, Williams is doing the only thing he knows how: launching a new app.
In a bizarre profile, Williams told The New York Times that just before his 50th birthday he realized he’d “underinvested” in his friendships. He then decided to design an app that would tell him where his friends lived because he did not know.
Behold Mozi: the fruit of Williams’s mid-life crisis. Like so many other tech apps, Mozi is a bit of software that sits between you and your friends. “Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL. Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap,” it explains on its website.
I’m not a billionaire investor, but I am a man approaching middle age. I’ve tended to some relationships well and others poorly. I use a variety of different digital tools to keep up with friends. I know where they live, however, and don’t need an app to tell me when they’ll be in town. The relationships I care about are good enough that a quick text message or note in a calendar app suffices.
I was in D.C. last week for a conference on nuclear weapons. I’ve got a lot of friends in our nation’s capital and I sent text messages to the ones I was interested in seeing. I had dinner with one who was available. It was pretty easy to set up. I didn’t need an app for it. But then, again, I’m not a billionaire who has spent the past three decades propping up startups and neglecting my personal relationships.
Many Americans go through a kind of midlife crisis. At the middle point of our lives, it’s apparent that the best is over and all that lays before us is decline. Time, which once seemed so limitless, is running out. Williams has the luxury, money, and time to launch an app in an attempt to wrestle with his midlife crisis. He’s powerful enough that the Times will spill ink about his sad and lonely life.
“While I treasure and nurture my friendships today, I was not always so mindful about them,” Williams said in a blog post announcing the app. “In fact, just a couple of years ago, I was trying to make a list of people to invite to my 50th birthday, and I had a sad realization: I didn’t have a robust set of friendships I felt great about given my stage in life.”
Scrambling to put together an app won’t fix the underlying problem. Mozi is so strange to me because it feels like it’s solving problems that have long been solved. It feels like a cry in the dark, an attempt by an aging rich man to claw back relationships he’s neglected. “It wasn’t me,” Williams seems to be saying. “It was this damn social media. All this tech. If only I’d made the right app, the right way.”
A lot of Williams’ blog reads like a southern woman who just discovered Chicken Soup for the Soul or a tech executive who’s just come down from a particularly harsh ayahuasca trip. “After a lifetime working at mattering, I realized I had under-invested in what really mattered: Relationships,” he said in the blog.
“The internet did make us more connected. It just also made us more divided. It made us more everything,” Williams told the Times. This is true. It’s also rich coming from the man who co-founded Twitter, a platform whose incentive structures fostered some of the worst human impulses on the internet.
Like all good entrepreneurs, Williams also outsourced the problem of actually developing Mozi. He needed someone else to solve the problem of his faltering human connections for him. “When I say I had ‘started building,’ what I actually did is write a two-page memo and hire a dev shop to build a prototype. This was shortly after I stepped away from day-to-day operations at Medium. And I was in no hurry to start another company,” he said in his blog.
Some people have a hard time keeping up the human connections in their lives, it’s true. Mozi probably won’t help them. This is an app for people like Williams or other tech people, the kind of folks who use a spreadsheet to organize faces they see around them or develop Obsidian org charts to wrap their heads around human connections.
Mozi is not the thing. It’s just another chore that keeps you from making direct contact with the people you want in your life. It’s another way to file them away into an abstract digital space. Make a phone call. Send a text. Write an email. Take a picture. Start a group chat. We have thousands of solutions to the problems Mozi solves.
We do not yet have a solution for what to do about sad, lonely, aging tech bros. Mozi, at least, is the least damaging of their recent projects.
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