An Anthropology of Gooners

Hello. Quick note before we begin this week. Search Engine does not particularly believe in content warnings. That said, this week the show is a little racy. It involves pornography. Maybe you want to skip if you're with a kid. Or you're my mom. Or my father-in-law. Okay, the episode after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI, the global film company that champions great cinema.

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I guess first things first, do you want to just introduce yourself? Yes. Hi, I'm Daniel Kolitz, and I'm a writer. And you've... Do you find it comfortable to talk about pornography? Difficult. Difficult. No, not at all. Really? I mean, I guess if I'm at a party, I wouldn't bring it up. But if someone wants to know about, you know...

This kind of thing, though, I find that very easy to discuss. And that is just how you are anyway? Or is it that you spend a bunch of time reporting and it has naturalized you in the world? I would say partly that. I mean, by the time I was finished reporting this piece... It was hard for me to remember that any of this was unusual. At a certain point, I was like, are people going to find this strange? Because I was so ignored to the crazy things I was looking at.

If Daniel's a nerd to the more extreme parts of the online porn world, it's because he spent a year investigating a subculture most of us would prefer not to think much about. Gooners. It's a word you might have already run into, but... just as a joke. If you're around teenagers, they really enjoy accusing each other of being gooners. But gooners are also a real subculture online, with their own vocabulary and social hierarchy and strange behavioral codes.

And if one of the missions of this show is to figure out what exactly the internet seems to be doing to everybody right now, both at its margins and in its mainstream, the time has come to try to understand the Gunners, whose story has lessons in it.

about how the internet affects all of us. Can you just explain what is gooning and what is a gooner? Sure. So gooning is a kind of ritualized form of prolonged masturbation. It involves basically trying to reach the goon state by masturbating for sometimes hours, sometimes days at a time. Goon state being a kind of masturbation nirvana, a flow state that most gooners claim is real and that you can tap into with practice.

There's also a community component. Now, not every gooner is part of the gooning community. Most are. And that is a world of discords and twitters. Sound like I'm 90 years old. That is a world online of...

People who masturbate together on camera, who play sort of gamified masturbation games, who are pornography enthusiasts and fans and oftentimes remixers of existing pornographic content. So the... core belief of the community is that there is a place, like the same way people who take psychedelics talk about having some elevated experience of spirituality or people who go on like silent meditation talk about, you know.

reaching something like enlightenment, these people are claiming that through kind of record-breaking masturbation sessions, they can get somewhere. Yes, that's their contention. And by the end of the process, I do believe them. I think it's real. Really? Kind of. I mean, just in the sense that I can see with enough stimulation and also oftentimes drugs, which I didn't really mention in the article, but which.

a good number of them use, you can work yourself into a kind of, I'm not saying it's like, you know, some kind of you're tapping into a new realm or dimension of consciousness, but I can certainly see the world falling away and getting single-mindedly... you know, focused on your porn world. And what do you normally write about? Oh, all kinds of things. Book reviews. I think the thing I published before this was about a neglected experimental novelist.

Short story writer, rather. So it's similar terrain. Well, it's cultural criticism. Yes, cultural criticism. And then, okay, before we even dive into your reporting journey to try to understand these people in this culture, one of the things that has confused me, like, I've...

run into the concept of gooning a lot, either people making jokes about online or I'm helping to raise teenage boys. And it's one of those words that they think, I don't know. And so they're constantly referring to like, other people having goon caves and stuff like that, I still feel like I struggle to just understand like how much the concept of gooning is a thing people do versus a thing people joke about or whether that's almost like a false distinction.

Yeah, I think right now, sort of an online meme culture. Gooning is just kind of a synonym for masturbation. You know, it's a synonym for a porn addict or someone who, you know, spends a lot of time watching pornography. That is distinct from this kind of gooning culture. So there's two different strands at play here. But the gooner, I mean, often it's just used as an insult now, I would say. Right. It's like perv or something. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

And why did you want to understand this? What was driving your curiosity? There were a few things going on. I mean, one was just sheer awe that any of this existed. I had first encountered it in the early pandemic period when these... Goon Caves first started diffusing across social media. And I was stunned at the time. I'd forgotten about them for a few years. But then the Goon Caves subreddit was banned last year. And there was a news story about that somewhere. And I saw that.

And it was like revelatory seeing it again. I was like, I completely forgot that these existed. What is a goon cave? Yes, I should definitely explain that. So a goon cave is kind of a porn consumption lair. with an extremely elaborate audio-visual setup, often multiple screens, upwards of a dozen screens, often a projector blasting porn onto the ceiling.

quite often printed out and taped up pornographic pictures on the walls, sex toys, lube. And in each of these images, of course, the Gooner's penises are foregrounded in the frame. So they'll take... They're proud. They're proud. They're proud. But it's an anonymous penis in a room that is decorated as like a shrine to pornographic consumption. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. So...

You want to understand something that is half real to some degree. How do you start trying to understand it? Where do you go? What do you do? It's a good question. So I am somewhat online in a kind of normal way. Not online in a kind of Discord. TikTok way. And so I tried to find out where the gooners were. It was Discord, which was a platform that I had never used before. I typed gooning into some kind of, you know, Discord.

server aggregator to see what was out there. I found the Goonverse. So it had 50,000 members, a lot of people. Yeah. Clicked into it, and it really was like being transported into another. It felt like my laptop was alive.

I'd never felt, not since like, honestly watching like, not that I would watch these on purpose, but like an ISIS beheading video. Basically, it was the equivalent in the sense that you're like, I thought I was ignored to whatever I would see on my laptop. So you get into the Goonverse. And there's a stream room, which is basically a Zoom call where you're all watching something together, but everyone is masturbating. Head's cut off at the neck, so it's just neck down.

They're watching pornography that I had no reference point for, this kind of hyperkinetic montage of just penises going into vagina, nonstop, crazy, one after the other, I would say. Not just humans, CGI-generated horsewomen, obviously a lot of hentai, things of that nature. And there's so much going on. I mean, they were kind of talking to each other. Some of them were kind of talking as if they were gamers.

I mean, I'm not a gamer myself, but what I would imagine gamers sound like, sort of talking shit on each other. But just so I understand, it's like... The thing you see, because Discord is more like a chat server. Yeah, and there's a lot of chatting going on these servers, I should say, too. But you're seeing live streaming video where there's like a center screen that's...

Just a super cut of the most kind of visceral or strange porn. And it's like montage. So it's just like very short clips one after the other. And then around it. people are filming themselves masturbating without their faces. That's exactly right. Nailed it. Yeah. And the vibe is like, it's not, these are people who would probably think of themselves as straight. You know?

I would say for the most part, at least the people that I then encountered and spoke to, but a lot of people are sort of, some are openly bi. It's a big community. It's a very large community. I would say most of the people that I end up talking to are people who identify as straight in real life and have had a weird kind of bi-curiosity unlocked in them by the rituals of the goon-verse. Got it. But the tone of conversation, they're not...

talking to each other in sexy, come on ways. They're talking like boys being kind of jockish. That was what I experienced. I mean, this is going, there's so many of these rooms and it's, you can, your listeners can go visit right now. A quick click away. I don't know if you're at work listening to this, but, you know, it's free. There's so many of them. But yeah, that was what I heard when I went in there. Okay. So that's the first thing you're seeing. This is this sort of, this is this.

strange new internet mediated thing that they're doing together um and then what like to the degree you can see like what is the view you're getting into into like their lives so you can see images of the rooms they're in yeah i remember noticing like spider-man trinkets you know like little like maybe they weren't funko pop specifically that's just the term i'm familiar with but like what you would expect you know sort of a nerd to own

But, you know, you're saying, I remember one person was masturbating on the toilet, so that was interesting. One really did look like they were masturbating in jail, which presumably they weren't, but it had a kind of, I would say the vibe overall is sort of dark, seedy, abject, possibly on purpose. Yeah.

Yeah. I had a friend in college who had an anthropology assignment, which was to go somewhere that made him uncomfortable. And we were in Montreal, and I went with him to the porn theater. And it sounds like that. Yes. Kind of bringing back the old kind of Times Square, you know. Yeah. It's the seediest district of the internet, I think I can, well, that's probably not true, but it was a seed district of the internet. And so then what happens, like, tell me about just...

meeting these people sure so basically I just start reaching out at random I'm dying to talk to these people once I got over my initial sort of shock let's say I was like I gotta figure out what's going on here I was worried at first because I figured you know These people aren't going to want to talk to me. I don't have an anti-masturbation agenda, but I think they would assume that a journalist was not coming in there to celebrate Goody. But people were immediately so receptive. Really?

Oh, yeah. They were so happy to talk to me. Now, there was one person who said, I'm not talking to journalists, and I did want to say, you're a gooner. Come on. But, you know, beyond that, everyone was just so eager to talk. So the task for me then became filtering out.

Just finding the right people to talk to, basically. And why did they want to talk to you? Like, what was your why? I mean, my sense of it now, one, is that cooning is a hobby, like any other. And this is a hobby you can't really talk about with... your friends, your colleagues. And it occupies so much of their lives. There's so many aspects of this community. I think they were just happy to have someone who wasn't involved directly in the community who could sort of sincerely listen. Yeah.

And so there's one particular person you met who I wanted to ask you about. I just want to make sure I'm pronouncing his name right. Spishak? Yes. That's his username. Yeah. So tell me about Spishak. Spishak is a 28-year-old pornosexual living in Los Angeles. And pornosexual. Right. You know, these terms are so familiar to me that I forget. This is not common language. Pornosexual is basically a voluntary celibate volcel.

who is not having sex because they are completely content with pornography, and they just want to watch porn, and that is their sex life. Can you describe yourself? on Twitter and on Discord is, like, pornosexual. Is that how you actually identify? Because I know some people sort of just say that, but that's not actually the case. I mean, do you feel that way? So...

Before, no, but the more that I've gotten into the community, I feel that way, yes. And what does that mean to you? I kind of know, but how do you describe it? I prefer porn over... having sex with a real person. I would just say that I would rather spend my time masturbating and watching porn versus having sex. I first came across him because this goon cave was really one of the most striking I'd seen.

Can you just tell me your setup right now? Like, if you're doing it maximal, like, what does it look like? Okay, so I have two 2K monitors, so 1440p. which was going to be my center and my right, and then my left monitor is a 1920 by 1080p. Then I have eight Samsung A7 Lite tablets, and then I have a... cheap $60 to $70 projector that I would use. Four monitors, eight tablets, over-air projector, porn on the walls.

sex toys, the whole setup. But what also is important to keep in mind to give a sense of the visuals here, each of these screens, it's not like... There's four screens. Each one is playing one pornographic film. It's four screens, each of which is playing like 30 pornographic films. And these pornographic films are themselves cycling in and out. So you're really looking at something like a thousand pornographic films in the course of, you know, a minute.

you kind of like zone out so you're seeing not everything but you're just like okay i can look in the center screen and then if i happen to drift off then maybe i naturally twist to the right or maybe i naturally twist the left wherever you look then there's So you were drawn to him because his goon cave was... Yes, elaborate goon cave. I didn't know anything about him when I reached out. Lives with his parents, so he has to basically build the goon cave when they go to sleep at midnight.

He says midnight to 8 a.m. is his prime hours of gooning. And they have no—they don't know. You know, if they do know, I doubt they want to bring it up. I don't think that's a conversation they want to have with their adult son. Are you ever worried they're going to walk into the room or something? Yes and no. So I plan everything to where it's the least likely.

Most people, if they're able to, you know, get into the cave, they'll go at whatever time. But for me, I have to wait until people are asleep. So that's usually like the time to where it's like, okay, there's a low chance that someone's going to bother me.

He said he always kind of had trouble talking to women. He had female friends, but he said he was never able to really, he was always friend-zoned, as he put it. And sometime around the pandemic, he was in college at the time. he found himself in this community. And from there, really just dove headfirst into this, you know, universe of porn, started identifying as a pornosexual. But when I... It's just more of a pros and cons game of, okay, yeah, if I have sex with this person...

The problem is I lose my virginity and I probably feel good. But then I also have to worry about making sure that they feel good, making sure it lasts a decent time. Is everything okay? Is mood setting fine? Am I being weird? Am I being too forward? Blah, blah, blah. Now I'm not good at reading signs, so now I have to wonder, okay, do they like this? Do they not?

Should I be doing something different? And that created so much anxiety that it almost wasn't worth doing. Huh. What? But that's the whole point of other people. No, I... I've had the same thought, yeah. I mean, I think these spaces, you know, the kinds of interactions you're having are so prescribed. You're sending each other your favorite pornography. You're sort of talking about a very specific set of things.

It can be very easy to just kind of check out of the difficulties of adult-human relationships, which can be, I think, quite rewarding, you know, to get to know someone, to be scared, and to not know what someone's thinking. trust them and learn how to trust people. And these skills, I think, not just in the porn addiction space, but maybe across society are being lost to some degree. And did he seem... I mean, it's interesting you're describing somebody who...

You know, he's 28 years old. He's living with his parents. He has an elaborate porn, like, dystopian theater that he's setting up and taking out every night. He also seems pretty self-aware about the sort of... anxieties that have gotten to that place. Like, did he want to be different or did he feel like he'd found this is fulfilling him sexually and he felt like a person who has understood himself to be happy in life?

That was the question I was always delicately tiptoeing around with the pornosexual crowd. Because I don't want to go out there and say, hey, how come you're not going on dates? You want to get out there? But I was curious. I mean, is this it? Are you content with this? In his case... For the time being, he said, yeah. I mean, the way he put it, it was easier to just fulfill his needs through, you know, the goon space and goon porn. And he was not at that time looking to change. End.

Did you, I mean, like, the fact that he's 28 and living with his parents who just, like, professionally things might not be going as well. He does have a job. He has a job, yeah. A lot of these gooners are, I'll just say, employed. Clocking in. So I work nine to five every day.

Monday through Friday. I mean, it might seem like, oh, you know, porn, I'm basically just watching porn whenever I have time. But usually it's, if I have free time, I can either split it between hanging out with my family or... my sibling or I could go to bed early and watch porn and you know I haven't hung out with them in a while okay let me let me hang out with them you know catch up you know make sure that I'm there

And then maybe instead of two hours, I'll have an hour to watch porn. And then if I'm physically like, and I'm exhausted, then I'll push it off to maybe the next day. Yeah. And I really want to be clear. He and many of these other people that I spoke to were totally sincere. Totally self-aware. They knew that what they were doing was sort of...

And that was honestly part of the appeal of the community is we're doing something that is like bizarre and transgressive in that way. I mean, I think I say in the article, I mean, it is, it's kind of like punk or something in the sense that. You know, they're doing something that mainstream society, that really, I would say 99.9% of people who have ever lived would find utterly repellent. And there is something, I don't want to say cool about that, but...

It's, you know, certainly interesting. One of the strange facts that hovers over Daniel's reporting comes from this survey he conducted, which he got 107 gooners to fill out. He found a data point that he hadn't expected. A surprising amount, 44% of the Gooners, had had sex in real life with another person. But when he cross-referenced that number by age, his findings made more sense.

The younger Gooners were unlikely to have had sex in real life. These were the young boys whose high school or college education had taken place during the pandemic. During the developmental stage where... antisocial, awkward teenage boys typically find that their raging hormones force them to develop social skills, these boys had instead apparently developed deep relationships with their screens, with pornographic fantasies. And then ultimately,

Online, with each other. And those relationships with each other, the way gooners use and exchange porn, I had not seen relationships like this in my entire life. Not even online. We're going to take a short break. And then we're going to examine what those relationships look like. How do two Gooners bond? After these ads, two words you won't find together in the Bible. Wank battling.

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Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board-certified OBGYN and menopause specialist. My new podcast, Unpaused, is the place for bold, unfiltered conversations about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life. Every week, I sit down with medical experts, cultural icons, and powerhouse women to talk about what really matters, your health, your power, and your future. We're covering hormones, identity, finances, relationships, and so much more.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen to and follow Unpaused with me, Dr. Mary Claire Haver. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the show. What is wank battling? So wank battling...

Well, there's something in the gooning world that is pretty common called feeding. And that is sort of one guy sending another guy pornography in an effort to get them off in a kind of, you know, just relaxed, friendly way. They come to learn their interests, their kinks, and they, you know.

Send them porn. And is this happening, like, is it like epistolary or is it like live? I think it depends. It's often like in Discord DMs. So it wouldn't be over video. It's like you have your, you know, most gooners have like a very... carefully set up like porn archive. But wank battling is kind of a gamified

version of feeding where they're rating the porn that they send to each other. Now, the rules here are unbelievably complex. And I tried learning about 8, 9, 10 wank battling and hentai wank battling.

Really tried learning how it works and wank battled myself. And I didn't really do a very good job in the end. Because it's like DJing. It's like a skill that you have to... Yeah. Well, you're supposed to sort of... pick up through the course of the game what your opponent is into you know like i realized that one of my opponents come dumpster was into e-girls and so i quickly had to sort of dive into the goon verse and find

It was very stressful. I don't see why anyone would enjoy this. It was honestly not pleasant at all. I felt like I was rapidly compiling a spreadsheet or something. But I was just sending him, trying to figure out whatever... he liked and, you know, he was giving me poor scores. Now there's always the risk that someone is just going to give you low scores so you'll have to keep feeding them pornography. But there are sort of like good faith rules in place to kind of prevent against that.

But isn't the thing you're describing, which is like two people are mutually pursuing an orgasm and over the course of it trying to figure out what the other person considers pleasurable, like isn't... The thing they were calling wank battling just sex? Yeah. And I hope that's what sex is like for everyone in the future. It's a beautiful vision. Yeah, no. I mean, there's a kind of intimacy there for sure. What a strange kind of intimacy though.

Yeah. Daniel explained that while wank battling involves the Gooners sending each other porn they found online, the Gooners also make lots of new pornographic clips for each other. That's a huge part of the Gooning world. But it's not as if they're videoing themselves. It's like they're creating sort of hyper montages. Yes. Well, sometimes they're recording themselves watching porn. Really? Yes. There are many meta layers of things going on here. But...

Yeah, so there is a thriving, let's say, folk art subculture in the gooning world, largely centered around PMVs, porn music videos. What's a porn music video? Porn music video is sort of a quick-cut spray of pornography, usually sourced from... Pirated OnlyFans clips, Pornhub clips. Gooners aren't paying for the porn, I should say, I think largely. And spliced into these sort of like supercut productions. Like you've seen, I'm sure, a fan cam.

you know? Yes. Sort of along those lines a bit faster. And is there actual music under the... Yeah, so I should say, not only is there actual music... Some of them make their own music, make gooning EDM songs that they play over the stuff. Okay, so the biggest person in the community is someone named Noodle Dude, who is one of the sort of key players in the scene, I would argue the most influential PMV maker currently living. He came in the scene around 2020, and he has really...

professional operation, genuine. I mean, you look at them, you're like, this takes a lot of work. He innovated almost by accident. When I spoke to him, he explained to me he was editing a PMV and the beat happened to line up with... The thrust, I guess I'll say. And he said, that's kind of cool. And he then went back to the clip and aligned everything so that the thrusting was synced to the beat. That is now the case, I would say, largely in almost every...

PMV video you see. Now, what's interesting about the PMVs, because they're largely composed of pirated content, they can't be hosted on Pornhub. So they had to make a separate site called PMVhaven.com, which I have to imagine is not long for this world, given the... really huge number of copyright violations going on there.

But if you go on PMV Haven, you will see there is an active, highly competitive, you know that Brian Eno term, seniors? Yeah, the idea that scenes sort of push each other towards greater artistic. Yes, that's exactly what's going on in the PMV space. I mean, I mean that. And they're doing sort of...

group vids where their different styles are being showcased you know I mean they're horrifying to watch a lot of them genuinely really tough to watch but also you look at them and you're like this is the future maybe I don't know It's weird. I feel like what you were encountering in your reporting is what I encounter hearing you recount your reporting, which is my internal compass sort of flips between.

despair and appreciation. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a kind of creativity on display there. It's a kind of creativity. It's people caring about the craft of something very, very strange. It's weirdly people making things for... I don't want to say like artistically pure, but I'm assuming that there are not vast profits to be seized here. No, I think Noodle Dude could have a subscription service going if he tried, but he's really the only one big enough to be able to.

to pull that off. It's so funny because it's like my strange digital puritanism is such that when I'm watching a non-pornographic, like a normal movie... If I start to watch something else on my phone, I feel disgusting. Like I feel like a fallen person. The idea that someone would intentionally set up almost like an infinite amount of porn screens.

That the point is the overstimulation. It's just like... Yes, they're leaning into brain rot. I mean, that's a big part of it. It's almost like fetishizing ruining your mind. Right. And it's part of it in terms of it's what they're celebrating or it's part of the joke or it's like... There's something humiliating and sexual about that. Yeah, I think that's all tied up. I mean, there's obviously, with certain communities online, a kind of difficult-to-parse, ironic thing going on.

But the main sort of thematic through line of the gooning community, and especially the content made there, is like, ruin your life, you're a disgusting porn addict, give up on society, you know. I would say for the most of the people engaging with this content, they don't actually plan on dropping out of the world and only watching pornography. I think it's kind of ties into a humiliation kink sort of thing, you know?

But it's different. It's a new kind of meta level because it's pornography that is about watching pornography. What is pornography that's about? What does it mean that the pornography itself is meta? Well, there's like... text that flashes on the screen saying like you're addicted to porn you're ruining your life

It's all these quick cut techniques. I mean, you even watch these porn music videos and it's hard to understand how someone would find it erotic because you can't even pay attention to anything. Everything's moving so quickly that it's almost more about... I don't know, the abjection and the humiliation of engaging with it in the first place that it is about sort of conventional, I don't know, whatever people get out of regular pornography, so to speak. Because it's not focusing on a...

character or a story or even a scene like the cuts are that fast yes the cuts are super fast i mean the way that i conceive of it is like you know obviously porn's changed a lot in the last like 50 years but fundamentally From the 70s to the present day, porn is still two people or more in a room having sex in something like real time. There's a climax. Whereas this pornography much more closely resembles the experience of just clicking around Pornhub. Because...

You know, a site like the tube sites, which, you know, emerged in the 2000s and have millions of clips. I think their internal data says that people will watch like 10 clips per session. No one's actually sitting and watching straight through. You know, I mean, I'm sure some are. But this kind of pornography is like porn by and for people whose dominant sense of sexuality is shaped by online porn itself. So it's like they've taken channel surfing.

And they've made Channel Surfing the movie. Yes, yes, basically. Okay, and it sounds like everything is both tongue-in-cheek and not tongue-in-cheek. I would say so, but, you know, it's interesting. In any big, sufficiently large, whatever, online space... you'll have some people who are in on the joke and some who aren't, and they can kind of interact if they're all saying the same things, even if some people might really mean it. So in the Gooning space, someone might say, you know, I just...

masturbated for eight straight days and I never want to have a job and, you know, my life is terrible and I love it. And they're doing a kind of joke, although kind of a strange one. And then you'll have someone else who says that and means it. And they can both happily trade porn and have a good time together. Yeah, it seems like that kind of dynamic, one, is very much a feature of the internet we're in right now. But also you see it in places where people are...

Coming together online to engage in behaviors that are sort of like in some ways socially taboo. Like I saw it when I was covering more cryptocurrency where people would refer to themselves as addicts and degenerates and sort of like gambling addicts.

And it was both a way of anticipating a real criticism they might have gotten from people in the world and of neutralizing it and of being self-aware, but not self-aware in a way that would change their behavior. It's like both feeling bad about the thing.

not feeling bad about the thing. It's a very effective defense mechanism that lets the community thrive. I mean, I've engaged in addictive behaviors myself, I might say. Not this kind, I want to be clear. And if you can joke about something, it does sort of... make it seem less serious maybe if you can just be like oh look at me i'm such a fuck up you know and you can sort of ridicule your behavior i think that's a way of maybe not interrogating it yeah

This is my favorite thing I learned about the Gooners from Daniel. Not that they're self-aware or somewhat self-aware. Many compulsive users of things possess something like this. some salve of humor and shame that lets them keep doing what they can't help but keep doing. What I enjoy about the Gunners is the idea that what Daniel believes is turning them on is, in part,

The gross feeling we all get from internet overconsumption. The stomachache that tells us our eyes overate. The notion that ideas put forth by theorists like Jonathan Haidt, who tells everybody that screens are bad for us. that our phones are damaging something important and invisible in us, a soul or a psyche. The idea that gooners hear that same refrain, but in the voice that a dominatrix uses to tell her submissive that he's disgusting.

that they found ecstasy in their own humiliation, I don't want to say I admire it. I just want to say it makes me appreciate how complex the human animal is. We're going to take a short break. When we come back... what the Gooners have to tell us about ourselves.

Welcome back to the show. How much do you understand the Gooners as existing just on a continuum with the rest of, like most of us who are consuming the internet? right now are consuming a more channel surfy, hyper montage, like overstimulated non-narrative version of the internet. We were talking to

Ryan Broderick's reporter a few months ago, and he was saying that he understands our current sort of short-form video internet as a pornographic internet. Not that it's all porn, but that it's all...

stimulation in the middle of a story. Do you think that's true? Yes. I will say that when I started reporting this piece, I thought I was writing a story about ready access to pornography and how it had affected the generation of young men. That was what I thought the angle was. By the time I was done... It was really a story about just sort of the rise of omnipresent, short form, flickering content, content everywhere.

The porn itself started to seem less interesting to me than the sheer volume of content being consumed and the way that it was edited and just the constant quick gratification. And it seemed on a continuum to me. With the rise of all this stuff across platforms, you know, even non-pornographically. That is more about we've created technology that lets us be as overstimulated as we want to be. And while most people's reaction to that...

to some degree is to try to find a kind of moderation, you're always going to have people who are like, no, I want to see what it's like to be super served by this. Yes, and you can really easily do that now. And I think, you know... These people are weirdly eroticizing that process, but there are plenty of people who watch non-pornographic TikToks for seven hours a day. You know, that's not a...

crazy kind of person. I mean, it's kind of crazy to do that, but those people exist, many of them. This is just sort of adding an extra layer of, I don't know, intensity or focus by masturbating while doing it. Do you think the reason that the normal internet is interested in the gooners is because the gooners besides that they're interesting and it's weird but that it's also like I don't know how to explain it that somehow it's like

The shame we all feel about our internet consumption, they're like a golem of, well, here's a much worse way to stare at your phone for seven hours. Yes. I think they're like the furthest possible extension of... something that we all engage into some degree. They're like the perfect subject of the content world, content regime. Yeah.

Because at most of what they're doing, like, hey, did you see this? Did you see this clip? Did you see this clip? Let me send you this clip. Oh my God, I can look at my screen while another screen. Like to some degree, we're doing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll look at Twitter for five hours a day, you know? And then afterwards, you feel gross. Yes, exactly. And I guess their sort of trick to get out of that is to say, I feel gross and I love that. Yeah. And that's turning me on, you know? Huh.

Did it change your internet consumption at all? Well, in a literal way, yes. I mean, I was basically clocking into the porn factory every day and, you know, queuing up my playlist of porn music videos. But, you know...

I wish I could say that, you know, since I reported this, I've become more conscientious about my social media. I mean, if anything, it's increased drastically, just sort of looking at the response of the article. But no, I mean, it is something that I, you know, would like to scale back. One of the things that I find confusing about my feelings about the piece is like, like, I don't, my social circle is, which is like Brooklyn.

journalists, whatever, are not people who are concerned about porn consumption. But it's tricky because it's like, I don't know, like, I think you can both, you can be not anti-porn, but say porn is culture. culture has effects good and bad. And this is one where, I don't know, it's slightly, did you feel that you walked out of this with different views on pornography than you walked in with?

You know, it maybe just kind of confirmed an intuitive sense. I mean, obviously, I'm not against pornography, whatever that would mean. I did have something in the back of my head that always wondered, like, what is the generation raised with instant access to porn on their phones? going to be like and i i'm sure the vast majority of them are not like this but this did suggest to me that this sort of like overflow massive library infinite library of porn

has, I don't know, created new ways of thinking about sexuality. It was always going to have some effect. There was no world in which you have all of this content out there. freely available to everyone from when they were a kid, and it would do nothing, you know? And so what this did was just show me, well, this is one of the things that it's done. I think usually people come at it...

from the angle of like, you know, how is this affecting like, you know, young men's real life sexuality. You know, you hear about like, you know, a lot of porn obviously is misogynist and violent. And that's always been a concern. This was more like, how does it affect the...

the actual like psychology day-to-day or just the way of thinking about sex that a younger person would have. Yeah. And do you think, I mean, do you see the Gooners as like a sort of subculture unto themselves or do you feel like... they're a hyperexpression of something that is sort of maybe happening with more, I'm trying not to use words like normal, but like typical, typical young man. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say.

I would assume, yes, most young men are not doing this, but I mean, you know, porn consumption is fairly widespread. I mean, obviously the Gooners take it to an extreme, but I don't think some of the stuff they're watching would be completely alien to a non-Gooner, you know?

I looked at one of the PMVs from your piece and it was, it really felt alien to me. I mean, you look at this, you're like, this is the future staring me in the face. There's something about it that is like, you only just like the clockwork orange. Like it really.

Just like, I don't even understand how a person could watch that, let alone masturbate to it. It is like a strobe light of pornography. Yeah, I felt like I was a medieval peasant who's going to put a VR headset on. I felt quite old. It's like someone, you know, an older person in the 50s hearing Elvis. something. I was like, this is really, this is crazy. But you don't feel concerned. You feel surprised.

I won't say I'm not concerned. I mean, I'm concerned, you know. But again, part of it is, you know, whatever, how this is affecting people's ideas and their sense of sexuality. But a lot of this piece for me was my... kind of anguish that nobody reads anymore you know because obviously i am a writer and you know To the extent I'm gooing anything, it's books. I love to read. And it seemed to me, especially, I don't know, in the last year with the kind of real rise of slop culture, that...

That way of being in the world might be on its way to being extinct. And, you know, this piece to me was like trying to look at what will replace that world. You know, what is the post literate culture as people are calling it? What does it look like? It's funny though, as someone who also has that concern, what I've actually noticed seems to be happening is that while 80, 90, whatever, some lion's share of the internet now is post-literate, it's all...

sort of just like pictures and shapes, there does seem to be a rise in people's desire to have someone, after the fact, make sense of the stream. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. I mean, there's just so much stuff that you need some kind of guide, I would imagine, but yeah. But it is like you have both the Gooners and the Harper's article. Yes, the Gooner explainers. Yes. The Gooner ethnographers. The job we all wanted to do when we were kids. Yeah, that's right. Ever since I was a little boy.

Daniel Kolitz. His excellent piece and harbors about all this is called The Goon Squad. You can follow him on the website he wishes he did not spend hours a day staring at, x.com. He's at Daniel Kolitz. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was produced by Emily Molter. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Fact-checking this week by Gus O'Connor. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some extras, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can join Incognito Mode at searchengine.show.

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