Twitter Co-Founder Expresses Deep Feelings of Sadness and Loneliness
Twitter Co-Founder Expresses Deep Feelings of Sadness and Loneliness
Billionaire Ev Williams, co-creator of Twitter and Medium, is currently in a funk. His remedy? Launch another app.
In a peculiar interview with The New York Times, Williams revealed that as he approached his 50th birthday, he discovered he'd neglected his friendships. He then came up with the concept for an app that would show him his friends' locations, as he was unaware.
Presenting Mozi, the outcome of Williams' middle-age crisis. Much like various tech apps, Mozi is a piece of software that acts as a bridge between you and your friends. "Mozi is a private social network for spending more time with your people in real life. Add your plans, see who's around, and know when you overlap," it explains on its website.
As a non-billionaire, middle-aged man, I've maintained some relationships effectively and others less so. I leverage different digital tools to keep up with friends and know their locations. An app like Mozi isn't necessary for me. I communicate with my valued friends via text messages or calendar notes.
During my trip to D.C. for a nuclear weapons conference, I reached out to friends I wanted to meet. I had dinner with one who was available. Coordinating was straightforward. I didn't need an app for it, but perhaps I'm not a billionaire preoccupied with startup ventures and neglected relationships.
Midlife crises are a common occurrence in America. When we hit mid-life, we come to terms with the best times probably being behind us, and the future looking dull. Our time, which once seemed boundless, is now limited. Williams has the resources, money, and time to create an app to tackle his midlife crisis. His sadness and isolation led the Times to publish an article about him.
In a blog post announcing the app, Williams admitted, "Though I value and cherish my friendships today, I was not always as mindful about them. In fact, just a couple of years ago, I realized I didn't have a well-established set of friendships I was proud of given my stage in life."
Developing an app won't address the root issue. Mozi strikes me as a solution to a problem that no longer exists. It appears to be a desperate plea by an aging billionaire to rekindle relationships he's overlooked. "It's not me," Williams seems to insist. "It was this darn technology. All these apps. If only I'd made the right app, the right way."
Parts of Williams' blog post read like a southern woman who just discovered her copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul or a tech executive who just emerged from an intense ayahuasca trip. "After dedicating my life to mattering, I realized I had underinvested in what truly mattered: relationships," he wrote in the blog.
"The internet did make us more connected. It also divided us. It made us more of everything," Williams admitted to the Times. This remark is significant, coming from the co-founder of Twitter, a platform that inadvertently fostered some of the internet's worst impulses.
Like all successful entrepreneurs, Williams outsourced the challenge of developing Mozi. He needed someone else to solve the issue of his struggling interpersonal connections for him. "When I say I started building, what I actually did was write a two-page memo and hired a dev shop to create a prototype. This was shortly after I stepped away from Medium's daily operations. And I had no immediate plans to launch another company," he wrote in his post.
Some individuals genuinely struggle to maintain human connections in their lives. Mozi may not be beneficial to them. This is an app tailored for individuals like Williams or other tech-savvy individuals, the type who manage their relationships using spreadsheets or intricate Obsidian org charts.
Simply put, Mozi isn't the solution. It's just another task that keeps you from reaching out to the people you want in your life. It's another method to organize relationships in an impersonal digital realm. Pick up the phone. Send a text. Write an email. Take a photo. Start a group chat. We have numerous ways to address the issues Mozi attempts to tackle.
At this point, we don't have a solution for what to do about disheartened, disconnected tech bros. Mozi, at least, is one of the least damaging projects they've attempted recently.
In light of his midlife realization of neglecting friendships, Ev Williams envisions a future where technology can aid in rekindling connections, potentially leading to the development of apps like Mozi. As a tech-savvy individual, I leverage various digital tools to keep up with friends and their locations, showing that the need for an app like Mozi isn't universal.