An Anthropology of Gooners

A reporter spends a year diving into a subculture of young men online who unite around their extreme commitment to constant, unadulterated porn consumption. Why are they doing this, what is it doing to them, and what does their existence tell us about the internet we’re all stuck on? The Goon Squad https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/ by Daniel Kolitz for Harper’s Magazine Daniel’s Twitter https://x.com/danielkolitz?lang=en Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  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. OK, the episode after these ads.

• 0:47PJ Vogt?

  I guess first things first, you want to just introduce yourself.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Yes, hi, I'm Daniel Kolitz and I'm a writer.

• 0:54PJ Vogt?

  And you've... Do you find it uncomfortable to talk about pornography?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Difficult.

• 1:00PJ Vogt?

  Difficult.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 1:02PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  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, no, I find that very easy to discuss.

• 1:10PJ Vogt?

  And that is just how you are anyway? Or is it that you spend a bunch of time reporting and it has like naturalized you in the world?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  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. I started to point, I was like, are people gonna find this strange? Because I was so inured to the crazy things I was looking at.

• 1:33PJ Vogt?

  If Daniel's inured 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.

• 1:46PJ Vogt?

  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 gooners, whose story has lessons in it about how the internet affects all of us.

• 2:20PJ Vogt?

  Can you just explain what is gooning and what is a gooner?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Sure. So gooning is a kind of ritualized form of prolonged masturbation.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  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. I 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

• 3:14Speaker 01

  games, who are pornography enthusiasts and fans, and oftentimes remixers of existing pornographic content.

• 3:23PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yes. That's their contention. And by the end of the process, I do believe them. I think it's real.

• 3:54PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:21PJ Vogt?

  And what do you normally write about?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  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 similar terrain.

• 4:32PJ Vogt?

  Well, it's cultural criticism.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yes, cultural criticism.

• 4:35PJ Vogt?

  And then, okay, before we even like 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.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  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 gooner, I mean, often is just used as an insult now, I would say.

• 5:35PJ Vogt?

  Right. It's like perv or something.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:38PJ Vogt?

  Okay. And why did you want to understand this? Like, what was driving your curiosity?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:12PJ Vogt?

  What is a goon?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yes, we 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 on each of these images, of course, the gooner's penises are foregrounded in the, in the frame.

• 6:43PJ Vogt?

  So they'll take...

• 6:46Speaker 01

  They're proud.

• 6:47PJ Vogt?

  They're proud. They're proud. But but it's an anonymous penis in a room that is decorated as like a shrine to pornographic consumption.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 6:56PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  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 Gooners. So I had 50,000 members. There's a lot of people.

• 7:29PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  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 inured to whatever I would see on my laptop. So you get into the Gooners, and there's a stream room, which is basically a Zoom call where you're all watching something together, but everyone is masturbating, heads caught 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

• 8:12Speaker 01

  into vagina, nonstop, crazy, one after the other. I would say not just humans, CGI-generated horse women, 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. It's what I would, I mean, I'm not a gamer myself, but what I would imagine gamers sound like, sort of talking shit on each other.

• 8:34PJ Vogt?

  But just so I understand, it's like, the the thing you see, because Discord is more like a chat server, nor like, it's like you.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's a lot of chatting going on at these servers, I should say, too.

• 8:45PJ Vogt?

  But there, but you're seeing live streaming video where there's like a center screen that's just a supercut 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.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Nails. Yeah.

• 9:09PJ Vogt?

  And the vibe is like, it's not, these are people who would probably think of themselves as straight?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:38PJ Vogt?

  Got it. And 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 jockeys.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  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. They're, they're a quick click away. I don't know if you're at work listening to this, but, uh, you know, it's free. There's, there's so many of them. But yeah, that, that was what I heard when I went in there.

• 10:02PJ Vogt?

  Okay. So, so that's the first thing you're seeing. This is the sort of, this is this strange new internet mediated thing that they're doing together.

• 10:12PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  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, but you would expect, you know, sort of a nerd to, uh, but you know, you're seeing, I remember one person was masturbating on the toilet. So that was interesting. One really did look like they were masturbating in jail, which I'm, 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.

• 10:47PJ Vogt?

  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 we went, I went with him to like the porn theater and it sounds like that.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yes. Kind of bringing back the old kind of Times Square, you know?

• 11:06PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  It's the seediest district of the internet, I think I can, well, that's probably not true for me, but it was, it was a seedy district of the internet.

• 11:13PJ Vogt?

  And so then what happens? Like, tell me about just meeting these people.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  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. You know, I don't have an anti masturbation agenda, but I think they would assume that a journalist was not coming in there to celebrate Goonie.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  But people were immediately so receptive.

• 11:44PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 11:45Speaker 01

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

• 12:00PJ Vogt?

  And why did they want to talk to you? Like, what was your why?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  I mean, my sense of it now, one is that Gooning is a hobby, like any other. And this is a hobby you can't really talk about with your friends, colleagues. And, you know, it occupies so much of their lives. There's so many aspects of this community. I think they were just happy to have someone, you know, who wasn't involved directly in the community, who could sort of sincerely listen.

• 12:25PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. And so there's a, there's one particular person you met who I wanted to ask you about it. I just want to make sure I'm pronouncing his name right. Speeshack?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yes, that's his username. Yeah.

• 12:35PJ Vogt?

  So tell me about Speeshack.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Speeshack is a 28-year-old pornosexual living in Los Angeles.

• 12:40PJ Vogt?

  And pornosexual?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Right. You know, these terms are so familiar to me that I forget. This is not common, common language. Pornosexual is basically a voluntary celibate, volcel, who is not having sex because they are completely content with pornography. And they, they just want to watch porn and that is their sex life.

• 12:58PJ Vogt?

  Can you describe yourself on Twitter and on Discord as 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, do you feel that way?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Um, so before, no, but the more that I've gotten into the community, I feel that way, yes.

• 13:17PJ Vogt?

  And what does that mean to you? Like, how, I mean, I, I kind of know, but like, how do you describe it?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Um, I prefer porn over having sex with a real person. I would just say that I um, I would rather spend my time masturbating and watching porn versus having sex.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  I first came across him because this goon cave was really one of the most striking I'd seen. Can you tell me your setup right now? Like if you're doing it maximal, like what, what does it look like?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Okay, so I have two, two K monitors, so fourteen forty P. Which is gonna be my center and my right, and then my left monitor is a nineteen twenty by ten eighty P. Then I have eight Samsung A seven Lite tablets. And then I have a cheap sixty to seventy dollar projector that I would use.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Four monitors, eight tablets, over projector, porn on the walls, sex toys, the whole setup. But what you 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 thirty 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.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  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 to the left wherever you look, then there's something to keep you stimulated.

• 14:51PJ Vogt?

  So you were drawn to him because his goon cave was-

• 14:55Speaker 01

  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 eight AM is his prime hours of uh, of gooning.

• 15:07PJ Vogt?

  And they have no, they, they don't know.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  You know, if they do know, I doubt they want to bring it up. I don't think they, that's a conversation they want to have with their adult son. Are you ever worried they're gonna like walk into the room or something?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Uh, yes and no. So I plan everything to where it's the least likely. Um, so 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, no one's gonna, there's a low chance that someone's gonna bother me.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  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 zone, as he put it. And sometime around the pandemic, he was in college at the time, he found himself in this community. And, uh, from there, really just dove headfirst into this, you know, universe of porn, started identifying as a porno sexual. But what I found interesting talking to him was one of his reasons for his porno sexuality. He could never know what was in another person's head. He would never know what the other woman was thinking.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  It's just more of a pros and cons game of, okay, if I have sex with this person, the pros, I lose my virginity and I probably feel good. Uh, but then I also have to worry about making sure that they feel good, making sure it lasts a decent time. Um, is everything okay? Is mood setting fine? Am I being weird? Am I being too forward? Blah, blah, blah. Cause then now I can't, I'm not good at reading signs. So now I have to wonder, okay, do they like this? Do they not? Uh, should I be doing something different?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  And that created so much anxiety that it almost wasn't worth doing.

• 16:48PJ Vogt?

  Huh. What? But it's, that's the whole point of other people.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  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 we all, quite rewarding, you know, to get to know someone, to be scared and to... Not know what someone's thinking, but 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.

• 17:31PJ Vogt?

  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 down 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 was, understood himself to be happy in life?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  That was the question I was always delicately tiptoeing around with the porno-sexual 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, are you just, is this it? Are you content with this?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:31PJ Vogt?

  And 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.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  He does have a job. He has a job, yeah. A lot of these gooners, I would always say, employed, clocking in.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  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, eh, I'm exhausted, then I'll push it off to maybe the next day.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  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... Strange, 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 it in the article, I mean, it is, it's kind of like punk or something.

• 19:42PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:52PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  And there is something, I don't want to say cool about that, but it's, you know, certainly interesting.

• 20:04PJ Vogt?

  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 forced them to develop social skills, these boys had instead apparently

• 20:47PJ Vogt?

  developed deep relationships with their screens, with pornographic fantasies, and then ultimately, online with each other.

• 20:57PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 21:09PJ Vogt?

  We're gonna 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 paddling.

• 21:27PJ Vogt?

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• 22:38PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 22:44PJ Vogt?

  What is wank battling?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  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 learn, come to learn their interests, their kinks, and they, you know, send them porn.

• 23:02PJ Vogt?

  And is this happening, like, is it like epistolary or is it like live?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  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 Uh, wank battling is kind of a gamified version of feeding where they're raiding the porn that they send to each other. Now, the rules here are unbelievably complex. And I tried learning about eight, nine, 10 wank battling and hentai wank battling. I really tried learning how it works and, and wank battled myself. Uh, and I didn't really do a very good job in the end.

• 23:36PJ Vogt?

  Because it's like DJing. It's like a skill that you have to-

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you're, 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 opponent's cum 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 like rapidly compiling a spreadsheet or something. Uh, but I, I was just sending him, trying to figure out whatever he liked and, you know, he was giving me poor score. 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, to kind of prevent against that.

• 24:17PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I hope that's what sex is like for everyone in the future. It's a beautiful vision. Uh, yeah, no. I mean, there's a kind of intimacy there for sure.

• 24:43PJ Vogt?

  What a strange kind of intimacy, though.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:47PJ Vogt?

  Daniel explains 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.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  That's a huge part of the gooning world.

• 24:58PJ Vogt?

  But not, it's not as if they're videoing themselves. It's like they're creating sort of hyper montages.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, sometimes they're recording themselves watching porn.

• 25:05PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  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 PMV's porn music videos.

• 25:18PJ Vogt?

  What's a porn music video?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  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?

• 25:37PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Sort of along those lines, a bit faster.

• 25:40PJ Vogt?

  And is there actual music under the?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I should say there, not only is there actual music,

• 25:48Speaker 01

  some of them make their own music, make gooning like EDM songs that they play over the stuff.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  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 thrusts, 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.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  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 pmvhaven, you will see there is an active, highly competitive, you know that Brian Eno term, seniors?

• 27:14PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, the idea that like the scenes sort of push each other towards greater artistic.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  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 are genuinely really tough to watch. But also you look at them and you're like, this is. The future, maybe? I don't know.

• 27:36PJ Vogt?

  It's weird. I feel like what you were encountering in your reporting is what I encounter hearing your reporting, which is my internal compass sort of flips between despair and appreciation.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a kind of creativity on display there.

• 27:56PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  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 pull that off.

• 28:15PJ Vogt?

  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 overstimulation. It's just like.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yes, they're leaning into brain rot. I mean, that's a big part of it. It's almost like fetishizing, ruining your mind.

• 28:43PJ Vogt?

  Right. And it's a 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.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's all tied up. I mean, there's obviously with certain communities online, a kind of a difficult to parse ironic thing going on, but the main sort of thematic through line of the Goonin 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, it's different. It's a new kind of meta level because it's pornography that is like about watching pornography.

• 29:36PJ Vogt?

  What is pornography that's about? What does it mean that the pornography itself is meta?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Well, there's like text that flashes on the screen saying like, you're addicted to porn. You're ruining your life.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  You are one of those people.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Keep scrolling further, deeper, forever and ever. Submit to porn. You can't survive.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  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 objection 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.

• 30:39PJ Vogt?

  Because it's not focusing on a character or a story or even a scene like the cuts are that fast?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  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 seventies to the present day porn is still two people or more in a room having sex in like 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.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  But this kind of pornography is like porn by and for people whose dominant sense of sexuality is shaped by online porn itself.

• 31:34PJ Vogt?

  So it's like they've taken channel surfing and they've made channel surfing the movie?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yes, basically.

• 31:41PJ Vogt?

  Okay, and it sounds like everything is both tongue in cheek and not tongue in cheek.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  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 Goonies 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, you know, happily trade porn and have a good time together.

• 32:21PJ Vogt?

  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 communities.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:21PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 33:27PJ Vogt?

  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 Gooners is the idea that what Daniel believes is turning them on is, in part, the gross feeling we all get from internet overconsumption. The stomach ache 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 cure that same refrain, but in the voice that a dominatrix uses to

• 34:12PJ Vogt?

  tell her submissive that he's disgusting, that they found ecstasy in their own humiliation.

• 34:19PJ Vogt?

  I don't want to say I admire it. I just want to say it makes me appreciate how complex the human animal is.

• 34:27PJ Vogt?

  We're going to take a short break. When we come back, what the gooners have to tell us about ourselves.

• 34:51PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 34:55PJ Vogt?

  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-montaged, like, over-stimulated, non-narrative version of the internet? We were talking to Ryan Broderick, a 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?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:12PJ Vogt?

  That is more about we've created technology that lets us be as over-stimulated 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.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:56PJ Vogt?

  Do you think that 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?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yes, I think they're like the furthest possible extension of something that we all engage in to some degree. They're like the perfect subject of the content world, content regime.

• 37:33PJ Vogt?

  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 see this clip. Oh, my God, I can look at my screen while another screen, like to some degree, we're doing.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'll look at Twitter for five hours a day, you know?

• 37:46PJ Vogt?

  And then afterwards, you feel gross.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And I guess they're sort of tricked to get out of that to say, I feel gross and I love that. And that's then that's turning me on, you know?

• 37:55PJ Vogt?

  Huh. Did it change your internet consumption at all?

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Well, in a literal way. I mean, I was basically clocking into the porn factory every day and, you know, queuing up my playlist of porn music videos.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  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 to the article. But no, I mean, it is something that I, you know, would like to scale back.

• 38:24PJ Vogt?

  One of the things that I find confusing about my feelings about this is like...

• 38:30PJ Vogt?

  Like, I don't, my social zergol, which is like Brooklyn journalist, whatever, are not people who are concerned about porn consumption. But it's tricky because it's like, I don't, like, I think you can both, you can be not anti porn, but say porn is culture, culture has effects, good and bad.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:51PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  You know, it maybe just kind of confirmed in 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 am 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, uh, has, I don't know, created new ways of thinking about sexuality. It was always going to have some effect, you know? There was no world in which you have all of this content out there freely available to everyone from when they're a kid, and it would do nothing, you know?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  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, I 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?

• 40:11PJ Vogt?

  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 hyper expression of something that is sort of maybe happening with? More, I'm trying to use words like normal, but like typical, typical young men.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, it's hard to say. I would assume, yes, most young men are not, 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?

• 40:46PJ Vogt?

  I looked at one of the PMVs from your piece and it was, it really felt alien to me.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  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 know, it's 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.

• 41:03PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I felt like I was a medieval peasant who's gonna put a VR headset on.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  I felt quite all. It's like someone, you know, an older person in the 50s hearing Elvis or something. I was like, this is really, this is crazy.

• 41:15PJ Vogt?

  But you don't feel concerned, you feel surprised?

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Uh, I won't say I'm not concerned. I mean, I'm, I'm concerned, you know? But again, part of it is, you know, whatever, how, 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,

• 41:39Speaker 01

  to the extent I'm goonin' anything, it's books. I love, 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?

• 42:06PJ Vogt?

  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, it's 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?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I mean, there's just so much stuff that you need some kind of guide, I would imagine, but yeah.

• 42:35PJ Vogt?

  But it is like, you have both the gooners and the Harper's article.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yes, the gooner explainers, the gooner ethnographers.

• 42:42PJ Vogt?

  The job we all wanted to do when we were kids.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Ever since I was a little boy.

• 42:53PJ Vogt?

  Daniel Kolitz. His excellent piece in Harper's 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.

• 43:39PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was produced by Emily Multer. 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, Maury Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orin 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.

• 44:21PJ Vogt?

  Please follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.

• 44:53PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vistaprint. As a small business owner, running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day, brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing search engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, VistaPrint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

• 45:38PJ Vogt?

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