To preemptively deflate the narrative: I never did find him. But I will say also that when I pictured him—the young man for whom all of this was real, who either missed the joke or understood that there had never been one—I’d see him always with limpid blue eyes, in a gown, with a shaved head, adjusting to the pills and reflecting, with stunned acceptance, on his ill-fated tenure in Goonworld. He would open up in group counseling sessions and organize movie nights for the other patients and see occasionally, in his mind’s periphery, the looming friend request of another would-be feeder, battler, jerk bud. And he would resist it.
That is to say: on some level I always imagined I’d find him better. As opposed to—as is more likely the case—much, much worse.
In my first conversation with Gooncultist, he described the goonstate in near-religious terms. “It’s one of those things where it only works if you believe that it could work,” he said. “Which makes it a real pain in the ass to reason about.” Did I believe in the goonstate? Months into my time in Goonworld, this came to seem like an urgent question, unanswerable by conventional journalistic means. If the goonstate were a collective fiction—if the gooners were lying about its existence, to me or to themselves—this would have to bear on my conception of them, would it not? How could I presume to cast judgment without trying to reach the goonstate myself? Plus, I’m only human, only so capable of absorbing the blows of any given day without occasionally yearning for a temporary off switch. The idea of dissolving the self in an acid bath of erotic imagery was not, in the end, so unappealing.
As a kind of warm-up, I decided on a bit of wankbattling. FeedBitch was by far the more courteous of my two eventual opponents, dismissing my opening volley—an image of the porn star Annabel Redd I’d sourced from the GoonVerse—with a sweet (if gently condescending) “not my taste qt.” Cumdumpster, by contrast, was brusque, peremptory, and stingy with his scores, as if I’d been put on earth to curate pornography for him. Of course, all of this was just so much procrastination in the face of my actual task, which awaited me in the GoonVerse’s stream room.
Looking back now, there are things I could’ve done to make my time in that stream room more successful. I could’ve purchased one of the many complicated male masturbation toys the gooners had drawn my attention to. I could’ve spent my years of peak brain development romping around a toxic-waste site, slurping sludge and indiscriminately licking circuit boards. As things stand, I can say only that it wasn’t for me. If there is a goonstate, I failed even to reach its threshold, stalling instead at states better known to me—the state of despair, the state of panic, the state of paralyzed awe at the onrushing future. I sat alone in a room with a laptop, watching myself watch other guys watch porn, wondering what the world will look like when I am old.
Even this late in the game, I struggled to understand how anyone could find any of this pleasurable, let alone addictive. But then, by the gooners’ own private admission—despite their constant protests to the contrary on their preferred Discord servers—most of them are not actually addicted to porn. (In fact, the research is far from settled on whether “porn addiction,” in a clinical sense, exists in the first place.) Certainly, they like porn a whole lot. Certainly, they are aroused by the concept of being ruinously in its thrall. Certainly, many of them are using porn to cope with some fairly serious life problems. But what your average gooner is up to is basically a kind of sad, confusing role-play. Like those lunatic trolls who emerge now and then to threaten the children of right-wing media targets, the gooners are just having fun, playing around, saying the things one says to get ahead in their particular community. Most of the gooners I spoke with had no interest in completely surrendering their lives to porn, and many looked askance at the truly devoted, ruin-your-mind pornosexual contingent. Those gooners, the other gooners insisted, are crazy: they give gooners a bad name.
But I can’t get entirely behind the few-bad-apples theory. Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.
Granted, day-in-the-life TikToks or unboxing videos won’t poison your soul to precisely the same degree as gooner porn. But it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends. Pornosexuals are clearly not the only people out there in the process of retreating from life. It’s probably more useful to think of a company like Aylo—the owner of Pornhub and most of the other major tube sites, as well as most of the name-brand porn studios—as just another large tech-entertainment giant, like Meta, Netflix, or FanDuel. From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box, about the absurdity of your need for it. What do these companies care? They’ve won. If they have their way—and they usually do—in time we will all be gooners, of a kind.
This isn’t to suggest that we aren’t enthusiastic collaborators in the progressive annihilation of our brains. Nor is it to suggest that, absent attention-shattering social platforms, we’d use the internet solely to keep up with friends and engage in improving hobbies. Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself. Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults? I find it hard to imagine. In the case of the gooners, one can hope—and in more cheerful moments, I do think it’s possible—that sustained overexposure to porn will dampen the medium’s effectiveness as a numbing agent. That at a certain point, the gooner will open his eyes, find himself in a room filled with lube but void of love, and decide that the boredom of staying in that room outweighs the fear of whatever lies beyond it.
To preemptively deflate the narrative: I never did find him. But I will say also that when I pictured him—the young man for whom all of this was real, who either missed the joke or understood that there had never been one—I’d see him always with limpid blue eyes, in a gown, with a shaved head, adjusting to the pills and reflecting, with stunned acceptance, on his ill-fated tenure in Goonworld. He would open up in group counseling sessions and organize movie nights for the other patients and see occasionally, in his mind’s periphery, the looming friend request of another would-be feeder, battler, jerk bud. And he would resist it.
That is to say: on some level I always imagined I’d find him better. As opposed to—as is more likely the case—much, much worse.
In my first conversation with Gooncultist, he described the goonstate in near-religious terms. “It’s one of those things where it only works if you believe that it could work,” he said. “Which makes it a real pain in the ass to reason about.” Did I believe in the goonstate? Months into my time in Goonworld, this came to seem like an urgent question, unanswerable by conventional journalistic means. If the goonstate were a collective fiction—if the gooners were lying about its existence, to me or to themselves—this would have to bear on my conception of them, would it not? How could I presume to cast judgment without trying to reach the goonstate myself? Plus, I’m only human, only so capable of absorbing the blows of any given day without occasionally yearning for a temporary off switch. The idea of dissolving the self in an acid bath of erotic imagery was not, in the end, so unappealing.
As a kind of warm-up, I decided on a bit of wankbattling. FeedBitch was by far the more courteous of my two eventual opponents, dismissing my opening volley—an image of the porn star Annabel Redd I’d sourced from the GoonVerse—with a sweet (if gently condescending) “not my taste qt.” Cumdumpster, by contrast, was brusque, peremptory, and stingy with his scores, as if I’d been put on earth to curate pornography for him. Of course, all of this was just so much procrastination in the face of my actual task, which awaited me in the GoonVerse’s stream room.
Looking back now, there are things I could’ve done to make my time in that stream room more successful. I could’ve purchased one of the many complicated male masturbation toys the gooners had drawn my attention to. I could’ve spent my years of peak brain development romping around a toxic-waste site, slurping sludge and indiscriminately licking circuit boards. As things stand, I can say only that it wasn’t for me. If there is a goonstate, I failed even to reach its threshold, stalling instead at states better known to me—the state of despair, the state of panic, the state of paralyzed awe at the onrushing future. I sat alone in a room with a laptop, watching myself watch other guys watch porn, wondering what the world will look like when I am old.
Even this late in the game, I struggled to understand how anyone could find any of this pleasurable, let alone addictive. But then, by the gooners’ own private admission—despite their constant protests to the contrary on their preferred Discord servers—most of them are not actually addicted to porn. (In fact, the research is far from settled on whether “porn addiction,” in a clinical sense, exists in the first place.) Certainly, they like porn a whole lot. Certainly, they are aroused by the concept of being ruinously in its thrall. Certainly, many of them are using porn to cope with some fairly serious life problems. But what your average gooner is up to is basically a kind of sad, confusing role-play. Like those lunatic trolls who emerge now and then to threaten the children of right-wing media targets, the gooners are just having fun, playing around, saying the things one says to get ahead in their particular community. Most of the gooners I spoke with had no interest in completely surrendering their lives to porn, and many looked askance at the truly devoted, ruin-your-mind pornosexual contingent. Those gooners, the other gooners insisted, are crazy: they give gooners a bad name.
But I can’t get entirely behind the few-bad-apples theory. Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.
Granted, day-in-the-life TikToks or unboxing videos won’t poison your soul to precisely the same degree as gooner porn. But it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends. Pornosexuals are clearly not the only people out there in the process of retreating from life. It’s probably more useful to think of a company like Aylo—the owner of Pornhub and most of the other major tube sites, as well as most of the name-brand porn studios—as just another large tech-entertainment giant, like Meta, Netflix, or FanDuel. From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box, about the absurdity of your need for it. What do these companies care? They’ve won. If they have their way—and they usually do—in time we will all be gooners, of a kind.
This isn’t to suggest that we aren’t enthusiastic collaborators in the progressive annihilation of our brains. Nor is it to suggest that, absent attention-shattering social platforms, we’d use the internet solely to keep up with friends and engage in improving hobbies. Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself. Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults? I find it hard to imagine. In the case of the gooners, one can hope—and in more cheerful moments, I do think it’s possible—that sustained overexposure to porn will dampen the medium’s effectiveness as a numbing agent. That at a certain point, the gooner will open his eyes, find himself in a room filled with lube but void of love, and decide that the boredom of staying in that room outweighs the fear of whatever lies beyond it.
Daniel Kolitz is a writer living in New York.
Man it just keeps going huh
He didn’t reveal the secret but the author is a gooner and his fetish is writing
I am gunna give the article a crack, but yeh I wanted to know what I’m in for first. I’m happy the author found an outlet