“The key that makes this product different” — came the excited voice, riding the dual stimulants of artisanal coffee shop caffeine and San Francisco Bay ocean air — “is it’s about human-to-human interaction. Having conversations face-to-face just like this.”
I spotted the animated tech founder’s hands gesticulating in front of the stoic nodding chin of the tech VC, as he quietly jotted notes into his moleskin. It’s a scene that has repeated itself on loop for decades at San Francisco coffee shop tables. Every city has its NPCs, the “non playable characters” of its matrix who ornament the sidewalks by embodying the caricatures of its culture. San Francisco is unique in that it creates its matrix recursively.
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In artificial intelligence, the term “recursion” means ‘the process of a system feeding its outputs back into itself’. San Francisco is the home of tech culture, mostly responsible for shaping the internet’s platforms, apps, algorithms, search engine results, and artificial intelligence operating guidelines. This is the culture that creates the tech that creates culture. It’s a snake eating its own tail further and further into tech jargon absurdity, embodied to perfection in the ever-indecipherable billboards lining the highway entrance to the city with newly minted tech industry acronyms that serve as passwords for unlocking venture capital funding to the utter bewilderment, I imagine, of most travelers passing through.
I visit often. It’s where the money is and being, admittedly, the pitch-man that I am, who am I to resist the pull of bringing my wares to Market Street and see if I can catch an idea or learn a new tech-jargon password being spoken on a breeze? So I smiled when I passed by a conversation pitching the promise of human-to-human interaction as the next novel big product idea in tech. It appeals to my affection for absurdity. At the same time, it offered a glimpse of promise that the grip of tech culture around the neck of our humanity remains loose even as it tries to tighten it.
The new term du jour is “F2F”. Coming to billboards soon. It means face-to-face; as in in real life. Human-to-human interaction. Something authentic. Mark Cuban made headlines for his bold prediction that the future would place a premium on in-person human interaction. “Within the next 3 years,” he wrote on Bluesky, “there will be so much AI, in particular AI video, people won’t know if what they see or hear is real. Which will lead to an explosion of f2f engagement, events and jobs. Those that were in the office will be in the field.”
He’s right. There is a visible future, if not already present, where the digital well has been poisoned by an imbalance of the artificial, crumbling under the weight of its own recursive babel. What can we humans do but look up and outward at each other’s faces again to see who we are without the filters? What would we actually find? And let’s not forget to also ask… how do we make sure somebody profits?
At the end of 2024, Ev Williams, San Francisco-based co-founder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium, began teasing his next forthcoming venture, Mozi, described as “a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL”. As Mozi co-founder, Molly DeWolf Swenson, told GeekWire in a January 2025 interview, “The goal is not to keep you on Mozi. The goal is for you to find what you were looking for and then get off your phone, and if we find people spending a ton of time on Mozi, we’re doing something wrong.”
According to the New York Times, Mozi has raised $6 million in seed funding. At the time of this writing, recent media coverage about Mozi’s launch awarded them a 92 out of 100 “Heat Score” on Crunchbase, which is an AI powered grading system that aims to measure how excited the venture capital world is about a particular business.
Already a mainstay in the digital-to-IRL connection, Airbnb has pivoted hard into their ‘Experiences’ platform, which represents “the next chapter of the company”. A quick search in my city, Los Angeles, offers me an array of F2F experiences. I can deepen my intimacy skills with Dr. Emily Emily Morse, host of the Sex With Emily podcast. I can learn to surf. Take a sailboat cruise. Get a tarot reading. Write and record a song in a studio. Ride a horse through Malibu. Meet a wolf. Even explore Sunset Strip with a music journalist.
This focus on platforms to facilitate F2F experience are in keeping with the long communicated vision of tech companies to “build a more connected world”. However, as a savvy Silicon Valley product manager once said to me, we too often focus on launches when we should focus on landings. Where did we land exactly with this vision? Are we more or less connected these days?
In 2024 a Harvard’s Graduate School of Education study titled Loneliness In America, found that about 1 in 5 Americans experience serious loneliness (a stat commonly found in similar studies) and that when asked what contributes to their loneliness, 3 in 4 listed technology. That Big Tech is now aiming to be the solution leaves us on the precipice of a leap not off our screens, but through them into the real world to find each other again.
Can our culture trust the source of its poison to be the source of its medicine? Or has it always been a matter of dose?
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