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 one 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 Moby, the global film company that champions great cinema, from iconic directors to emerging authors, there's always something new to discover. If you're looking for something really special, check out Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, the eagerly awaited new film from Jim Jarmesh, now streaming on Moby in the US. It follows adult children navigating their relationships with somewhat distant parents and each other. It starts Tom Wates, Adam Driver, Mayam Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Kate Blanchett, Vicky Cripps, India Moor, and Lucas Sabat. Moby is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe. Perfect for lovers of great cinema, and for anyone who hasn't discovered how much they love it yet. To stream the best of cinema, you can try Moby free for 30 days at Moby.com-SlashStreetChengine. That's m-u-b-i.com-slashstreetChengine for a whole month of great cinema for free. I guess first things first, you want to just introduce yourself. Yes, hi, I'm Daniel Colet, and I'm a writer. Do you find a conversation about pornography? Difficult. No, not at all. Really? I guess if I'm at a party, I wouldn't bring it up, but if someone wants to know about this kind of thing, 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 is 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. I started to point out, are people going to find this strange because I was so ignored to the crazy things I was looking at? If Daniels inert 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 gooners, 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? 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 a 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 silent meditation, talk about 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 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 are you normally right about? Oh, all kinds of things. Book reviews. I think the thing I published before this was about a neglected experimental novelist. Which was a story writer rather. So similar terrain. Well, it's cultural criticism. Yes, cultural criticism. And then 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 meeting jokes about online or I'm helping 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 start 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 play here. But goon or 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? Like 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 done 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 new 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? Yes, I should definitely explain that. So a goon cave is kind of a porn consumption layer with an extremely elaborate audio visual setup. Often multiple screens, upwards of a dozen screens. Often a projector blasting porn into 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 gooners 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? 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 discord server aggregator to see what was out there. I found the goonverse. So I had 50,000 members. A lot of people 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 of 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. 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 penis is going into... Non-stop, crazy. The one after the other, I would say... Not just humans, CGI-generated horse women. Obviously a lot of hen-tie, things of that nature. And there's so much going on. I mean, they're kind of talking to each other. Some of them are 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 to each other. But just to... Just what I understand, it's like the thing you see... Because Discord is more like a chat server. Yeah, and there's a lot of chat and going, 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, 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. 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 by. It's a big community. It's a very large community. I would say most of the people that 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 Goonverse. 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 jock at you. That was what I experienced. I mean, this is going... There are so many of these rooms. And you can... Your listeners can go visit right now. They're... A quick look at the comments. I don't know if you're at work listening to this, but it's... Freelicit, 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 the sort of... This is this strange, new internet-mediated thing that they're doing together. And then what... To the degree you can see, what is the view you're getting into into 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 funco-pops specifically. That's just the term I'm familiar with. But like what you would expect, you know, sort of a nerd-toe. 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 I'm presumably they weren't. But it had a kind of... I would say the vibe overall sort of dark, CD-object, 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 we went... I went with him to like the porn theater. And it sounds like that. Yes. Kind of bringing back the old kind of time square, you know. Yeah. It's the CD's district of the internet. I think I can... Well, that's probably not true for me. But it was... It was a CD 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 got to 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 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 journalist, come on, I did want to say you're a gooner. Come on. But, you know, beyond that, everyone was just so you got to talk to 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 Goody is a hobby like any other. And this is a hobby you can't really talk about with your friends, colleagues, and you know, I occupy 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. Yeah. And so 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, Spisha. Yes. That's his username. Yeah. So tell me about Spisha. Spisha 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 these is not common, common language. A pornosexual is basically a voluntary celibate, volssell 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 porn or sexual? Is that how you actually identify it? I know some people sort of just say that, but that's not actually the case. I mean, do you feel that way? I'm so before no, but the more that I've gotten into the community, I've yielded that way. Yes. And what does that mean to you? Like, I mean, I kind of know, but like, 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 tell me your setup right now? Like, if you're doing it maximal, like what, what does it look like? Okay, so I have two two cave monitors, so 1440p, which was going to be my center and my right. And then my left monitor is a 1920 by 1080 key. Then I have eight Samsung A set of light tablets. And then I have a cheap, next to $70 projector that I would use. Four monitors, eight tablets, over a projector, porn on the walls, sex toys, the whole setup. But when you also was 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 something to keep you stimulated. So you were drawn to him because his gun cave was a labored gun cave. I don't know anything about him when I reached out. Lives with his parents. So he has to basically build the gun cave when they go to sleep at midnight. He says midnight to 8 AM is his prime hours of, uh, of gunning. 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 they, that's a conversation they want to have with their adult son. Are you ever worried they're going to like, to walk into the room or something? Yes and no. So I plan everything to where it's the least likely. Um, so most people just are 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, now there's a low chance that someone's gonna 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 friends on 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 found interesting talking to him was one of his reasons for his pornosexuality. He could never know what was in another person's head. He would never know what the other woman was thinking. It's just more of a pros and cons game of, okay, I've asked this person. The pros I lose my opportunity and I probably feel good. But then I also have to worry about making sure that they feel good, making sure I last the decent time. Is everything okay? Is it just food setting fine? Am I being weird? Am I being too forward? Global blog is done. 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? Should I be doing something different? And that created so much anxiety that it almost wasn't worth doing. But that's the whole point of other people. No, 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. Yeah. 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. These skills, I think, not just in the porn addiction space, but maybe across society or 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 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 has understood himself to be happy in life. That was the question I was always delicately tipped to on the round 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, are you just, 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 that time looking to change. 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... It does have a job. He has a job, yeah. A lot of these gooners are, I was all the same, employed. Clocking in. So I work nine to five every day. Oh. Monday through Friday. I mean, it might seem like, oh, you know, porn, I'm basically just watching porn right over 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 hang out with them, you know, catch up, you know, make sure that I'm there. And then maybe instead of two hours, I have an hour to life for it. Is that different physically, like, and exhausted? That I'll push him off to maybe the next day. Yeah. Thousands. 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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 crossed reference 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 anti-social, awkward teenage boys typically find that they're 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, wink battling. You want to send me to Michael Thompson who bucked the whole A B, dropped out, and testified against them. And you think I'm going to go there and convince him to recant? Let's talk, yay! Open the door. He has created this illusion of who he is. I was just stunned that I would have a conversation like this with an ex gang leader. I was in the hearing and I thought, oh my goodness, these girls are fallen for his bullshit. I think they're going to let this guy out. The world would be a much better place with this man out. It's like a light just kind of pours out of him. And I was determined to help that light get out into the world. Blood memory, a new podcast series from Love and Radio. Search for blood memory, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the show. What is wink battling? So wink battling, well there's something in the gooning world that is pretty common called feeding. And that is sort of one guy setting another guy pornography in an effort to get them off and kind of relax friendly way. They come to learn their interests, their kinks, and they send them porn. And is this happening like, is it like a pistol area or is it like live? I think it depends. It's often like in Discord DM. Okay, 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 wink 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 eight, nine, ten wink battling and hentai wink battling. I really tried learning how it works and wink battles 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, Comdomster, was into e-girls. And so I quickly had to sort of dive into the goonverse 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. But I was just sending him trying to figure out whatever he liked. And, you know, he was giving me porous. But 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're calling Wang 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 Wang 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 goon world. But not it's not as if they're videoing themselves. It's like they're creating sort of hyper montage. Yes. Well, sometimes they're recording themselves watching porn. Really? Yes. There are many metal 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 the porn music video? porn music video is sort of a quick cut spray of pornography usually sourced from pirated only fans clips, porn hub clips. Gooners aren't paying for the porn, I should say. I think largely. And spliced into these sort of like super cut productions. Like, you've seen I'm sure a fan can, you know? Yes. Sort of along those lines a bit faster. And is there actual music under them? Yes. So I should say they're not only is there actual music. Some of them make their own music, make gooning like EDM songs that they play over the stuff. Good evening. This is my game. Okay. So the biggest person in the community is someone named Noodle Jude 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 PMV is because they're largely composed of pirated content. They can't be hosted on PornHub. So they had to make a separate cycle 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, you know, that scene sort of push each other towards your taste. That's exactly what's going on in the PMV space. I mean, I mean, that they're doing sort of group vids where there are different styles are being showcased. You know, I mean, they're horrifying to watch. A lot of that were 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 your reporting is what I encounter hearing your account reporting, which is my internal, combester 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 or 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 you tried, but he's really the only one big enough to be able 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-mornagraphically, a normal movie, if I start to watch something else on my phone, I feel disgusting. 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 over stimulation. It's just like, yeah, they're leaning into brain rod. 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, it's like, there's something humiliating and sexual about that. Yeah, I think that's all tied up. I mean, there's obviously was certain communities online that kind of difficult to parse ironic thing going on. But the main sort of thematic through line of the goon in 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 kind of thing. Yeah. But it's different. It's a new kind of metal level because it's pornography that is like about watching pornography. What is pornography that's about what, 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. Over 200 and 10 million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You are one of those people. You have nothing and I just want to play. It's crawling. 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. Orronic 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. 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 has 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 and like something like real time. There's a climax. Whereas this pornography much more closely resembles the experience of just clicking around porn hub. Because you know, a site like the tube size, 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 goonning 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 also says that and means it. And they can both, you know, 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 way, especially 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. And they 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. I mean, I've engaged in addictive behaviors myself and 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 fuckup. 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, somewhat self-aware. Many compulsive users of things possess something like this. Some self 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 over consumption. The stomach ache that tells us our eyes over eight. The notion that ideas put forth by theorists like Jonathan Height, who tells everybody that the 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 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-surfie, hyper montage, like over stimulated non-narrative version of the internet. We were talking to Ryan Broadrex for a quarter of 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-accessive pornography and how it had affected the generation of young men. That was what I thought the ankle 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 in the way that it was edited and just the constant quick gratification. It seemed on a continuum to me with the rise of all this stuff across platforms, even non-pornographically. That is more about we've created technology that lets us be as overstimulated as we want to be. 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 that. Yes, and you can really easily tooth that now. These people are weirdly eroticizing that process, but there are plenty of people who watch non-pornographic TikToks for seven hours a day. That's not a crazy kind of person. It's kind of crazy to do that, but those people exist. Many of them. This is just adding an extra layer of 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. 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 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 any of 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 they're sort of trick 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. Huh. Did it change your internet consumption at all? Well, in a literal way. I was basically clocking into the porn factory every day and, you know, queuing up my playlist to 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 to 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 of peace is like, like, I don't, my social circle is, 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. Yes. 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 port on their phones going to be like? And 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, you know? 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. 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 it's affecting young men's real life sexuality. You know, you hear about like, you know, a lot of porn, obviously, it's wasosaginous and violent. And that's always been a concern. This was more like, how does it affect the actual 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 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 man. Yeah. I mean, I, it's hard to say I mean, I would assume, yeah, 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 an ongooner, 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 fed. There's something about it that is like, you only need to like the clockwork orange. Like, it really just like, I don't even understand how a person could watch that little masterbred to it. It is like a strobe light of pornography. Yeah, I felt like I was a medieval peasant with someone who put a video set on. I felt quite old. 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, 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 the 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, 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 well, 80, 90, whatever, some lion share of the internet now is post literate. It's all, it's just sort of 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 street. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. I mean, there's just so much stuff that you need some kind of guy that would imagine, but yeah. But it is like you have both the gooners and the Harper's article. Yes, the gooners explainers. Yes. The gooners ethnographer. The job we all wanted to do for New York kids. Yeah, that's right. Ever since I was a little boy. Daniel Colott's, 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.harm. He's at Daniel Colott's. So our attention is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ vote, and truthy pinimini. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. This episode was produced by Emily Maltaire. Theme original composition and mixing by Armin Bizarrean. Fact checking this week by Gus O'Connor. Our executive producer is Leah Restennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Mara Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Warren 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 Search Engine Duck Show. Please follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.