Across the Gooniverse

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0:01:31 One of the great promises of the internet.
0:01:31 One of the great promises of the internet.
0:01:33 One that actually came true.
0:01:46 Is that no matter how eclectic your taste, how unique your particular oddball obsession, how small your subculture, you can go online and find community.
0:01:50 Which brings me to the goon verse.
0:02:00 It’s a digital subculture devoted to endless pornography and what I can only describe as ritualized masturbation.
0:02:03 Niche?
0:02:05 Yeah, sure.
0:02:16 But another promise of the internet is that subcultures born there will eventually bubble up into the culture itself and change it.
0:02:21 What felt weird and underground becomes normal.
0:02:35 And this subculture, the goon verse, with its focus on pleasure and endless content and chasing dopamine hit after dopamine hit, might just be a window into the future for all of us.
0:02:41 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:48 My guest today is writer Daniel Kolitz.
0:02:54 He spent months reporting on The Goon Verse for his Harper’s Magazine piece, The Goon Squad.
0:03:05 It starts as an investigation into an obscure porn community and ends as a piece of serious cultural theory.
0:03:15 And I will warn that this episode talks a lot about pornography and masturbation because this is a story about internet pornography and the people obsessed with it.
0:03:20 But deep down, it’s also a story about our society and what it’s becoming.
0:03:25 Or maybe, even worse, what it already is.
0:03:35 Daniel Kolitz, welcome to the show.
0:03:36 Thank you so much for having me.
0:03:41 For people who haven’t read the piece, what in the world is gooning?
0:03:41 Yeah.
0:03:45 So gooning, two things involved here.
0:03:51 On the one hand, we have, let’s call it a masturbatory practice, a way of masturbating, a new way of masturbating.
0:04:01 That basically involves edging, and if your audience isn’t familiar with the term, that is masturbating to the point of climax without climaxing.
0:04:13 Edging for a prolonged period over the course of hours, if not, in some cases, days, with the aim of attaining the goon state, which is a kind of masturbation nirvana.
0:04:17 A transcendent zone of pure bliss, some liken it to advanced meditation.
0:04:20 The world falls away.
0:04:21 You’re completely immersed in the pornography.
0:04:23 So that’s gooning the act.
0:04:36 But gooning also refers to a gooning community that is out there, mostly congregating on Discord servers, on certain parts of Twitter.
0:05:02 And there, they goon together, sometimes on camera, sometimes playing games together, porn games, trading porn, talking about porn, and basically sort of, in some cases, role-playing, in some cases, sincerely being crazy porn addicts who are completely consumed by the act of porn consumption.
0:05:05 Why did you think it was worth writing about?
0:05:09 What was it about this that suggested to you, oh, I’ve got to write this.
0:05:10 This matters.
0:05:11 That’s a good question.
0:05:15 On the one hand, just the surface-level luridness of the subject, which was just fascinating.
0:05:31 And if you go into these spaces, you see just this, like, unbelievably elaborated and, like, specific, precise—they have this language, not just goon state, but goon fuel, all kinds of weird ways of talking.
0:05:35 So you just look at it, and it’s just fascinating, and, you know, it’s like, this exists, someone should write about it.
0:05:37 Like, anthropologically, it was just fascinating.
0:05:38 Anthropologically interesting.
0:05:42 But beyond that surface level, I mean, a few things were going on that got me interested in this.
0:05:58 On the one hand, you know, there was, at the time I started reporting this, the kind of softcore pornography thing going on on all the big social media platforms, you know, and these are mostly leading to OnlyFans accounts.
0:06:04 And I wasn’t against any of this, but I was like, this is—it’s sort of interesting that I log on to Instagram in the middle of the afternoon.
0:06:16 I’m essentially fed porn, and, you know, the immediate thing that kind of brought my attention back to all of this was the banning of the Goon Cave subreddit.
0:06:31 So a Goon Cave is an elaborate porn consumption rig set up with multiple screens, with overhead projectors blasting porn, with porn pasted to the walls, lube everywhere.
0:06:36 And certain Gooners would post these to something called the Goon Cave subreddit.
0:06:43 And it was banned because, I think, revenge porn was found on some of the screens, and this led to a news story or two.
0:06:46 So that was the immediate thing that reminded me of it.
0:06:50 And so all these things kind of converged and brought me into this community.
0:06:53 I mean, that’s what compelled me to check out the discords.
0:07:00 And once I sort of entered those, I was stunned by what I found and, you know, went down the rabbit hole in a serious way.
0:07:02 Done by what?
0:07:12 Well, again, I mean, you know, the first thing I saw when I went in there, I was in the Goonverse, which is a Discord server with about 50,000 members, at least when I first went in.
0:07:13 There’s probably more now.
0:07:16 That’s pretty big, no?
0:07:16 50,000?
0:07:18 Oh, it’s large.
0:07:21 And, I mean, there are dozens of these, many of them with just as many people.
0:07:24 I mean, I’m sure there’s some overlap, but, I mean, you know, there’s some with 100,000.
0:07:27 But I went in there and I clicked on the stream.
0:07:31 I didn’t know what to expect, and I just instantly saw it was like a Zoom call.
0:07:34 Where everyone was masturbating to the same porn they were watching together.
0:07:37 And I was like, whoa, whoa.
0:07:43 I mean, they were cut off at the neck, because it was neck down, and they were just, you know, I shouldn’t pantomime my wrong camera.
0:07:50 But they were fervently going at it and talking to each other and sort of, you know, I don’t know.
0:07:52 It was, like, weirdly, like, competitive or gamer-like.
0:07:56 And the stuff they were watching was so crazy, not just the content, but the way that it was edited.
0:08:03 It was this fast, rapid-paced pornography where, you know, there was nothing that was on the frame or on the screen for more than, like, two seconds.
0:08:05 And I just found the whole thing stunning.
0:08:17 I mean, you started digging around, trying to talk to these people to kind of get a sense for, you know, how they thought of it and how it fit into their lives and what it meant to them, you know, et cetera.
0:08:19 And actually, a lot of them wanted to talk to you, right?
0:08:22 Like, this wasn’t terribly difficult to find people to talk to you about Goonie.
0:08:24 Oh, they were thrilled to talk to me.
0:08:25 Why?
0:08:28 Well, you know, there are a few things going on here.
0:08:35 One was that I would assume that this stuff is difficult to talk about at the workplace, at the family dinner table.
0:08:40 You know, you don’t want to be—you can’t talk about this stuff.
0:08:41 But at the same time, I mean, it’s a real hobby.
0:08:48 And I mean that, I mean, not just with the equipment, but with the time invested, with the connections made.
0:08:53 I mean, this, like any other hobby, you know, it’s a real way of living.
0:08:56 And I guess you can’t really talk about it with people who aren’t in the community.
0:09:00 So I think, you know, the surveys and the interviews I conducted were anonymous.
0:09:03 So I think people were fairly comfortable opening up.
0:09:18 But at the same time, I think, I don’t know, a lot of people seemed to feel this was like a part of their lives that it had taken up a big part of their brain space.
0:09:23 I think they were happy to unburden themselves of some of what they were going through in there.
0:09:26 You used the word hobby.
0:09:27 I mean, is that—
0:09:28 Oh, yeah.
0:09:30 Is that how most gooners think of it themselves?
0:09:33 I mean, is this an identity?
0:09:34 Is it a hobby?
0:09:34 Is it a lifestyle?
0:09:36 Is it an addiction?
0:09:38 Is it all of the above?
0:09:40 What do most gooners think they’re doing?
0:09:44 Well, it’s honestly very complicated.
0:09:47 I mean, let’s just go with the addiction thing.
0:09:51 So the entire sort of conceit of being a gooner is that you’re addicted to porn, right?
0:09:56 Gooning is, in a sense, a kink, the kink being I’m addicted to pornography.
0:09:58 It can get to some crazy levels.
0:10:05 I mean, fantasizing about a world completely dominated by pornography, porn on billboards and Times Square, things of that nature.
0:10:09 So it’s like a weird meta kink about pornography.
0:10:20 So the addiction thing also gets complicated because there’s this really intense debate in, you know, academic circles and also in, I guess you could call,
0:10:25 amateur anti-masturbation circles about the validity of porn addiction as a clinical diagnosis.
0:10:42 I mean, I think right now the kind of the line you hear most often sort of in more legitimate institutional circles is that porn doesn’t really have, you know, there’s no – it’s not a clinical addiction the way heroin addiction or even gambling addiction would be a clinical addiction.
0:10:53 And I think the study most often cited, there might be a few of them, is that, you know, one’s perception of having a porn addiction is tied to, you know, one’s shame around that addiction.
0:10:59 The distinction between hobby and addiction itself feels very slippery in this context.
0:11:07 I don’t know where the line exactly is between the two when the entire digital economy is designed to make us dependent on stimulation.
0:11:08 You know what I mean?
0:11:12 Like all of our technological hobbies at this point are functionally addictions.
0:11:12 Absolutely.
0:11:14 It’s like a sliding scale, right?
0:11:15 I mean, we’re all on it.
0:11:17 No, I know.
0:11:34 And I mean, I often – I mean, that was the insight I had really delving into Goon World was that this is sort of the furthest extension of what you’re talking about, where if the internet is designed to get people addicted to things, you know, these people are almost like leaning into that and parroting it.
0:11:36 And making it sort of their identity.
0:11:39 Yeah, I want to get right there.
0:11:49 Before we do, just one more question along these lines so that people have a sense of who we’re talking about here, right?
0:12:02 Because something you say in the piece is you sort of assumed, and I would have assumed going into it, that, you know, a lot of these people would be the maladjusted in-cell types.
0:12:09 But you also say, actually, a lot of them, most of them, were distressingly normal.
0:12:14 What was so distressing about their normality?
0:12:18 Well, I mean, here you have kids who – I shouldn’t say kids.
0:12:28 I mean, they were, you know, for the most part, 20-somethings who were not jabbering lunatics, who were not, as you say, sort of maladjusted in-cell types.
0:12:44 They were people who were sweet-natured and sincerely – you know, obviously, this gets complicated when you talk about, you know, objectification, pornography, whatever.
0:12:46 But I didn’t get a lot of hate from them.
0:12:50 I didn’t get a lot of, like, resentment from them.
0:12:59 I mean, if the in-cell thing is I hate women because they won’t have sex with me or I don’t think they’ll have sex with me, I won’t go out and, you know, try to go on a date or whatever.
0:13:00 I can’t get a date.
0:13:04 The gooner thing is like a celebration.
0:13:12 It’s like I can’t get a date and that’s fine and I love women anyway and I’ll go home and I’ll, you know, masturbate to pornography for 15 hours.
0:13:17 I don’t want to be needlessly graphic here.
0:13:18 That’s not the point.
0:13:28 But I want to ask about the kind of pornography they are consuming and how it’s different from conventional porn.
0:13:36 Because this is really getting to what’s maybe the real fetish here, which is not actually porn.
0:13:38 I mean, porn is obviously part of it.
0:13:41 But there’s something more meta going on, right?
0:13:44 Like you said earlier, I think, they’re embracing their own brain rot.
0:13:45 Like, that’s the kink.
0:13:50 And that’s the thing that makes this so culturally ominous.
0:13:55 Yeah, the fetish is consuming media, basically.
0:14:00 Because the porn that they watch, so the dominant form here is something called the porn music video.
0:14:06 The porn music video takes hundreds of clips of pre-existing porn.
0:14:10 So stuff sourced from OnlyFans, stuff sourced from Pornhub.
0:14:20 It’s sort of hundreds of clips spliced together, synced to really pounding, driving techno beats, where the image is sort of cycling out every three seconds.
0:14:25 You know, you can barely latch on to anything because things are moving so quickly.
0:14:36 It’s less about any individual woman than it is about just sort of, like, shapes and colors and, like, the female form, so to speak.
0:14:48 I mean, the conventional porn film would be two to, I don’t know, four, six, ten people in a room engaged in a sexual experience.
0:14:54 Like, this is much more like an embodiment of the experience of clicking around on Pornhub.
0:14:56 It’s the supercharged version of that, right?
0:15:02 The supercharged version of that, which is you watch the second of a clip, you move around the scrubber bar, you go to the next clip.
0:15:03 You know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
0:15:07 And it is just sort of making it so you don’t even have to do that work.
0:15:14 So, yes, it is – but, again, because it is so hard to actually pay attention to any one thing going on, it is more about the wash of media.
0:15:21 It’s more about the stimulation than it is about, you know, the porn itself in many ways.
0:15:32 How many of these gooners that you interacted with still have sex with actual people in the actual world?
0:15:33 Do they even want that?
0:15:41 I mean, how many of these people are asexual or postsexual or pornosexual, a word you might need to define?
0:15:42 It’s a real term.
0:15:51 Yeah, I mean, so I conducted this gooning questionnaire that I distributed to – I think I sent it out to 1,000 people.
0:16:01 And if I’m remembering the math correctly, it was something like 40 percent claimed to be sexually active in some capacity.
0:16:05 That could have meant they were sexually active at some point in their lives.
0:16:28 But the majority – not a huge majority, but the majority were self-described pornosexuals, which is to say people who have no interest in real-life human sexuality, sex, and are perfectly content with porn being their sex lives.
0:16:47 And this can be done in a kind of almost self-consciously nihilistic, dark way where they’re sort of giving in to objection and are turned on by the idea of being, you know, unlovable and really diving into that.
0:16:52 Or it could be done – and I don’t know if this is even better necessarily – in a kind of positive way.
0:17:02 I mean, I spoke to people who viewed it – viewed pornosexuality as, you know, it’s like I work out, I have my porn, I have my friends, I have my video games, and viewed it as a kind of mental health thing.
0:17:08 I mean, not getting involved in these kinds of what they would perceive to be psychically destructive romantic entanglements.
0:17:26 Part of what horrified me is there’s a guy who says that he can’t have real sex because he can’t bear the experience of not knowing what is in someone else’s mind, what someone else is thinking.
0:17:29 And just think about what that really means, right?
0:17:36 Like, you can only reach that level of anxiety by being so totally trapped in your own head and your own thoughts.
0:17:42 And that kind of neurosis feels very of this era.
0:17:50 And I thought it was telling, very telling, that the gooners, for the most part, that are still having real relationships with people are the older ones.
0:18:01 It’s the younger ones, the ones completely raised in this terminally online culture and this detention economy that drives it, who can’t deal with the actual world.
0:18:03 Or maybe even worse, they don’t want to.
0:18:05 And that should scare the hell out of everyone.
0:18:07 It scares the hell out of me, for sure.
0:18:11 Yeah, when I heard that, when he said that, it almost felt too neat.
0:18:13 I was like, God, are the op-eds true?
0:18:15 And I think they are, to some degree.
0:18:27 I mean, op-eds about maybe the lockdowns, to some degree, or just sort of growing up online, creating a fear of the ambiguity that is an inevitable part of interpersonal human relationships.
0:18:36 I mean, when you’re dealing with people online, when you’re dealing with them on a surface level, whether that’s in your porn community, whether that’s gaming with strangers, whether that’s just having random Twitter relationships with people,
0:18:39 those are relationships that are fairly low-maintenance, I would say.
0:18:46 Those are relationships where you don’t really have to worry very much about what the other person is thinking about you, because fundamentally, you don’t know them.
0:18:55 We all know, those of us who have, you know, done the work to become people in the world, which, you know, again, many of these good news are.
0:19:00 I don’t want to write them all off as completely malformed individuals.
0:19:05 Plenty of them, you know, are out there and having a good, normal, healthy time socially.
0:19:09 But, you know, a great number of them aren’t and are open about that.
0:19:24 I think, as, you know, this kid I spoke to represented, Spishak was his username, there’s just this terror, terror of the other and terror of, I don’t know, certainly of rejection.
0:19:35 And, I mean, it can be uncomfortable to not know what somebody is thinking about you or, you know, whether somebody hates you.
0:19:44 I mean, honestly, this is, before he even said that, this had been, you know, in all the writing that I’ve done, it’s something I always think about.
0:19:53 I think it’s one of the fundamental questions of existence, that two people can be in love or can say they’re in love, can be in a relationship, and one person can be thinking, I want to get out of there.
0:19:57 I mean, you often hear when breakups happen, the other person says, I had no idea you were feeling that way.
0:20:02 And it can be traumatizing, and then you can sort of get in your head going forward.
0:20:07 But this is, again, I would say salutary, healthy, productive stuff.
0:20:11 This is the stuff that kind of allows you to move forward and live life.
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0:24:26 When did you realize this story was about a hell of a lot more than porn?
0:24:28 It’s a good question.
0:24:37 I mean, there was a period in my life, this would have been last winter, I would say, when I was really at the peak of my goon anthropology.
0:24:49 When I was waking up every morning with a sense of overwhelming dread, because I knew I would be opening up the laptop, and especially when I was trying to understand the PMV as a form.
0:24:58 Now, I watched way more of those than would ever have been actually strictly necessary for the reporting process, probably like 500 of them when I could have watched five or six.
0:25:13 But I’m mentioning this because I would wake up every day and watch this hyperkinetic pornography and talk to these people and look through these spaces and, A, feel my brain atrophying in real time.
0:25:31 But, B, the more I looked at it, I mean, as I was saying, the more it seemed like this was just a crazy, and almost like, in a way, collectively, an almost funny parody of the internet, you know, writ large.
0:25:42 And it’s sort of the mechanisms of attention getting that, or, you know, attention marshalling, whatever, that keep all of us sort of locked into our platforms.
0:25:50 Because ultimately, when I was talking to people about their porn consumption habits and what keeps them locked into Discord, I mean, I’m looking at Twitter constantly.
0:25:53 I’m looking at Twitter like five hours a day.
0:26:03 Now, I’m reading tweets about media gossip or whatever, and they’re watching, you know, insane porn, but at the end of the day, you’re all looking at a screen.
0:26:06 It’s all screens all the way down.
0:26:14 And, you know, this tied in with a kind of general terror I had in that moment about sort of the death of literacy writ large.
0:26:19 I mean, it used to be you’d go on the subway, and a few people would be reading the newspaper or something.
0:26:29 But at this time, I would go on the subway, and people would just be watching Family Guy clips or watching, you know, video game replay.
0:26:40 It seemed like, especially in the last two or three years, video had just completely supplanted text as a way that, you know, people encountered the world.
0:26:55 And the constant blinding stimulation that was being foisted by almost every tech company, and it’s like knockdown effects, you know, across culture, especially politically.
0:27:00 I mean, that was also, this was sort of the beginning of Trump too, was terrifying to me.
0:27:17 And I also, you know, not to go on too much about this, but my friend at that time, because I was kind of going to his apartment and sort of like shell-shocked talking about this stuff, lent me a book by a writer named Neil Postman, who I’d heard of before but never actually read.
0:27:32 And he has a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is a kind of Jeremiah against television and what he perceived even, I think this would have been 40 or something years ago, as, you know, the replacement of a textual culture by a visual culture.
0:27:43 And, you know, he was talking about television when there were four or five channels, you know, he was in vain against, I mean, it’s honestly, frankly, funny, he was in vain against Sesame Street and why that was, you know, disastrous.
0:27:59 And, you know, I would have these debates with my friend who, you know, not even debates, we were in total agreement where, you know, people tend to say in these conversations, well, you know, when they invented the printing press, people thought that would be disastrous for society.
0:28:05 People thought, you know, the invention of television would be a disaster or radio going back further than that.
0:28:07 And me and him were like, you know what, they were right.
0:28:16 I mean, maybe not the printing press, but everything afterwards, it’s like they are correct, possibly, is that, you know, all these things have been progressively worse.
0:28:18 I mean, you know, do I totally buy into that?
0:28:21 No, but I can feel that way sometimes looking at the direction of the culture.
0:28:31 And the Gooners really seem to embody, like, this is where, I don’t think everyone’s going to end up this way, but it seemed like, you know, this was one outcome of the culture I’m describing.
0:28:36 That Postman book is one of my favorites, certainly in the last 50 years.
0:28:41 And, you know, that, his rant against Sesame Street, right?
0:28:43 Like, it’s not that he hates Sesame Street.
0:28:47 It’s not even that he thinks Sesame Street doesn’t actually teach kids.
0:28:48 It does.
0:28:50 The problem isn’t that it’s not educational.
0:28:57 The problem for him is that it conditions children to think that education has to be entertaining in the way that TV is, right?
0:29:08 And so the thing is here, right, like, this for me is where the piece really starts to land when you situate Gooning in the larger attention economy.
0:29:16 I mean, like, we are all being conditioned, trained to chase stimulation, to live on screens and consume content, content, content, content, right?
0:29:17 All day, every day.
0:29:29 And if you really think about it, I don’t know if you say this explicitly, but you kind of do, Gooning is just, or I’ll just ask you, do you think Gooning is just an extreme version of what we all do online?
0:29:42 Like, if we just set the masturbation stuff aside, how different really is Gooning from compulsively watching YouTube videos or TikTok reels or binging shows on Netflix, which we all do?
0:29:45 Fundamentally not that different.
0:29:50 I mean, you have to imagine, so let’s say you’re looking at a person doing this from a few feet away.
0:29:53 What they’re actually watching is irrelevant.
0:29:57 I mean, I guess, again, in this case, they are masturbating all the time, so it would look somewhat different.
0:30:02 But that aside, it’s the same in many ways.
0:30:07 I mean, you are physically, again, masturbation aside, doing the same thing.
0:30:10 And it’s not just that you’re sitting there washing a screen.
0:30:17 It’s that you are chasing sort of – I mean, the kind of advent of the vertical scroll and the kind of like –
0:30:18 The dopamine hit, right?
0:30:20 You just – more, more, more, more, more, more.
0:30:21 Another line.
0:30:22 Yes.
0:30:28 And porn is just that kind of stripped to, you know, stripped to its base level.
0:30:29 It’s freebasing content.
0:30:29 Yeah.
0:30:32 This is the most stimulating content there is.
0:30:36 I mean, I think that is why it wasn’t surprising to me when the platforms exploded with softcore porn.
0:30:46 It’s like, obviously, you know, this is – if their goal is to keep people on the app or keep people engaged, what kind of content is more stimulating than that?
0:30:51 PORT is just like the ultimate sort of addictive content.
0:30:54 Addictive, again, being a complex term in this context.
0:30:56 I’m just going to read from the piece because it is so good.
0:30:58 You write, what are these gooners actually doing?
0:31:02 Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content.
0:31:05 Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms.
0:31:08 Parasocially fixating on micro-celebrities who want their money.
0:31:12 Broadcasting their love for those micro-celebrities in public forums.
0:31:16 Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to.
0:31:23 In general, renouncing connective other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone.
0:31:25 Does any of this sound familiar?
0:31:26 End quote.
0:31:28 Why, yes, Daniel.
0:31:29 Yes, it does.
0:31:33 It sounds like we’re all gooners now.
0:31:34 Is that what you’re saying?
0:31:36 Are we all gooners now?
0:31:38 We just – a lot of us don’t know it yet.
0:31:40 To an extent, yeah.
0:31:44 And what’s, you know, also worth noting is that, yes, the gooners are watching more porn than the average person.
0:31:50 But not even the porn aspect of it is foreign to a lot of people, probably myself included.
0:31:52 I say probably, give myself plausible deniability.
0:31:56 But, I mean, you know, it’s not like the gooners are the only people watching porn.
0:31:58 These porn sites are the most popular sites on the internet.
0:31:59 That are among them.
0:32:03 So, yes, we are both literally and metaphorically gooners, I would say.
0:32:07 Well, that’s depressing.
0:32:09 Yeah.
0:32:18 You say that it is very easy and it is easy to look at this specimen of internet creature and think of it as alien.
0:32:28 Because, yes, sitting in front of 30 screens like you’re in The Matrix with, like, compilations of porn blaring all around you, that is really alien.
0:32:34 But you say this is really just a more honest version of all of us.
0:32:36 Say more about that.
0:32:40 Yeah, well, I mean, it’s intentional on their parts.
0:32:42 I mean, again, this is a kind of role play.
0:32:54 A lot of these people are just lying about their consumption habits or, you know, are probably watching more than the average person but are enjoying the idea that they are so disgustingly enthralled to this stuff.
0:33:07 But, you know, I think that you can convince yourself – for instance, in my own experience, if I’m looking at Twitter, I can think, well, you know, I’m writing stuff and it’s good to be up on the discourse.
0:33:14 Or even looking at Instagram, I can think, well, I need to know what, you know, the people I know are up to even if it’s someone I’ve met like twice.
0:33:24 There are all kinds of rationalizations one can make for basically wasting your life looking at content online.
0:33:33 The Gooners make no attempt to justify what they’re doing or to, you know, try to make it seem like it’s benefiting them in any way.
0:33:37 Their whole thing is this is bad for me and I love it and I’m leaning into it.
0:33:44 So in that sense, there is a kind of honesty because that is what a lot of people do when they, you know, lay in bed and watch TikTok for seven hours.
0:33:55 I mean the entire concept of like bed rotting or whatever and certainly brain rot and like all these like cutesy self-deprecating ways people talk about, you know, overconsumption of media.
0:33:57 You know, you see it all the time.
0:34:06 It’s like, oh, God, I can’t believe that I just like, you know, watched Netflix for an entire weekend or I can’t believe that I just scrolled TikTok for an entire afternoon.
0:34:13 You know, I think we give ourselves a lot of slack for this kind of behavior and not to say we shouldn’t.
0:34:15 I mean, you know, whatever.
0:34:28 But again, I think the fact that they’re like, yes, I’m watching 20 hours of porn and it’s really bad for me and it’s destroying my brain and I love that so much.
0:34:29 That is why I’m doing it.
0:34:38 And I’m turned on, in fact, by the damage that I’m doing to myself by engaging with mindless stimulation all day long.
0:34:41 You know, I think that’s a big part of it.
0:34:55 I haven’t watched any of these videos, but I did hear an audio clip and I just just so people understand and in in the audio clip, I guess, obviously, there’s the porn sprawling around on the screen.
0:35:05 But you hear, I guess there’s that EDM music, but then you hear a voice comes in and the voice is literally talking to the gooners saying, you’re terrible.
0:35:06 This is a world.
0:35:08 We’re all drunk on content.
0:35:10 All we want is content, content, content.
0:35:11 Look at you.
0:35:11 You’re pathetic.
0:35:12 Drink it in.
0:35:13 Lean into it.
0:35:18 Look, a kink is a kink, right?
0:35:21 And to anyone who’s like not into it, it doesn’t quite compute.
0:35:27 But, like, on a psychological level, like, what is the whole self-deprecating meta shit there?
0:35:29 Like, what is that accomplishing?
0:35:36 Like, why the jokey-jokey, wink-wink, look how gross and disgusting and shameful we are, ha, ha, ha?
0:35:37 Like, what is the point of that?
0:35:39 It’s a good question.
0:36:07 I mean, I think certainly in some instances I would talk to people who would say that they weren’t happy with their lives in various ways and that leaning into that in a neurotic context, I don’t think that’s uncommon in a sort of kink context, leaning into this kind of shame was perversely validating or comforting or, I don’t know, made them happy in whatever way.
0:36:21 But the meta nature of it all, I mean, you know, it is, again, it’s porn about porn, which is to say it’s, like, media about media.
0:36:38 So it’s, you know, it is, it’s like if you, I mean, to think of it, you know, in non-pornographic terms, imagine if you were watching sort of some sort of C-level show on Netflix and the show kept saying, like, isn’t this the dumbest fucking show you’ve ever seen?
0:36:42 Can you believe you’re watching this horrible sitcom right now?
0:36:49 What are you, lying there covered in, you know, Cheeto dust watching this for six hours in a row?
0:36:50 What’s wrong with you?
0:36:56 I mean, I don’t think you would see that in any Netflix show, but that is the equivalent of the kind of content they’re watching.
0:37:04 I guess if you can eroticize that, maybe you can, I don’t know, break through and start to feel less bad about what you’re doing.
0:37:09 But ultimately, I think a lot of these people feel even worse in the end as sort of like a self-punishment.
0:37:11 So I don’t know if there’s a way out.
0:37:14 It’s a pretty bleak, bleak arrangement.
0:37:17 That’s one word for it.
0:37:23 Maybe again, maybe it’s the, like you said, maybe it’s the honesty, right?
0:37:33 Like if you, as soon as you sort of think of this in terms of like the attention economy and the dopamine hits from content and all that, it’s a drug like any other, right?
0:37:39 Like any drug, the more you do it, the greater your tolerance is.
0:37:42 And so you need more and more and more and more to get the same experience.
0:37:49 And that’s why if you live your life consuming content on a long enough timeline, you’re a gooner.
0:37:52 You’re on the road to full goondom.
0:37:54 I would totally agree with that.
0:37:55 I think that’s true.
0:38:08 I think the usual conception that we have is you watch enough porn, you get into more and more extreme content because you’re no longer stimulated by, you know, the vanilla porn you’re watching.
0:38:09 Maybe that’s true.
0:38:10 Maybe that isn’t.
0:38:15 Again, these are hotly contested questions that I’m frankly not eager to wade into the debates around them.
0:38:22 But so what I was going to say is that here the extremity is not of what is actually happening in the videos.
0:38:25 The extremity is of the video’s actual form.
0:38:30 So it’s not like, I mean, the content can be extreme, but it’s not like you’re watching more and more extreme content.
0:38:49 You’re watching more and more extreme ways of sort of digesting that content, faster and faster videos, you know, more and more sort of like hyperspeed, like almost unintelligible clips because you’re so used not to the erotic stimulation, but to the stimulation in general.
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0:42:56 So I have his, like, six-year-old son.
0:43:04 And we do the best we can to, you know, limit his time on screens like a lot of parents, right?
0:43:08 It’s a bit of a hopeless battle.
0:43:13 But one of the things I observe in watching him is you can,
0:43:20 the more they get accustomed to slicing up reality, like being able to start, stop, you know,
0:43:23 watch all these, like, Mr. Beast and all these sort of, like, YouTube accounts
0:43:26 that are, like, aimed at young people, the pace, the way they moved,
0:43:31 it’s so, it’s so, like, hyperkinetic, to use your word, and so stimulating, right?
0:43:33 Like, every five seconds, there’s a sound or a noise.
0:43:35 Not even every five seconds, like, every two seconds.
0:43:44 And he consumes that enough, and you start to see this intolerance for stillness, right?
0:43:48 This inability to just, like, sit down, watch a story, watch a movie.
0:43:50 Because to do that, you have to sit with the narrative.
0:43:52 It’s got to unfold.
0:43:53 You’ve got to be patient.
0:43:58 But no, that being conditioned to need that constant engagement,
0:44:01 that constant stimulation makes it impossible, almost,
0:44:05 to just sit quietly with a book or a long movie.
0:44:08 Again, maybe that’s the post-literate thing, right?
0:44:10 But I’m just hammering this point over and over again.
0:44:11 It’s worth hammering.
0:44:14 I mean, that’s what this was about, and that’s what I noticed.
0:44:16 I mean, this was sort of in an earlier draft.
0:44:18 I got into this, and this was not in the finished piece.
0:44:26 But, you know, the classic porn setup, right, was the pizza man comes to the apartment.
0:44:27 Or the plumber.
0:44:30 Or the plumber, the pizza man, the pool boy.
0:44:32 You know, there’s some well-established tropes.
0:44:37 And I’m not saying that porn was ever unbelievably well-written.
0:44:39 I mean, I know there was kind of a golden age in the 70s,
0:44:42 and that’s what the first half of Boogie Nights is about.
0:44:48 But the sex scenes were enriched, in a sense, by the narrative buildup.
0:44:52 Nicholson Baker has a wonderful book called Vox, where, you know,
0:44:57 he writes about sort of his pleasure in the buildup, right?
0:45:04 And, you know, this sense of narrative, this sense of cause and effect,
0:45:11 the sense of, you know, sex being enriched by being embedded in some kind of narrative context,
0:45:18 it’s not surprising if people aren’t going on dates having sex and are exclusively engaging with online porn,
0:45:20 that that would no longer be interesting.
0:45:25 And I think beyond porn, there is a culture-wide turn away from complex causal narrative.
0:45:30 And when I bemoan a kind of post-literate culture, it’s because, I mean,
0:45:35 there is real joy and value in unpacking complex narrative.
0:45:39 I’ve been thinking endlessly about a book called J.R., which, frankly,
0:45:43 literally today might be the 50th anniversary of its publication,
0:45:46 certainly in the last few weeks.
0:45:55 J.R.B. novel by William Gaddis, this famously forbidding 800-page book written entirely in dialogue,
0:46:01 where it’s never specified who’s speaking, where every sentence is cut off in the middle.
0:46:06 And, you know, it’s not, at first, the most entertaining book to read,
0:46:08 because you have to kind of learn how to read it.
0:46:14 By the time you do, though, it becomes genuinely the funniest book I’ve read in my life.
0:46:19 And, you know, I think there’s one way to look at that and say,
0:46:24 I’m just trying to seem sort of smart or interesting by saying a book that I love is really,
0:46:26 by saying I love difficult books, whatever.
0:46:32 No, what I’m interested in is a more intense degree of pleasure.
0:46:37 That’s what I want out of books, is not to seem smart, not even to learn anything necessarily,
0:46:45 but to be able to tap into a kind of pleasure that takes a little bit of work, but that is more valuable.
0:46:50 When people bemoan a kind of post-literate culture, they think that people are being snooty or pretentious.
0:46:53 I just, I like pleasure.
0:46:54 I’m fully in favor of pleasure.
0:46:56 I go to books to laugh.
0:47:02 And again, JR is the funniest book I’ve ever read, but it is a kind of pleasure that can only be unlocked with work.
0:47:05 It is, you are working to enjoy yourself more, ultimately.
0:47:08 Is this where the internet was always going?
0:47:15 Was this gooning inevitable, or do you think maybe we’re giving the internet too much credit or too much blame?
0:47:22 Maybe the technology just exposes what was always there, always true.
0:47:27 People have always had this instinct to turn inward and self-destruct in pleasure.
0:47:35 And maybe the only thing new about this is that it’s just so damn easy to do it and to find other people doing it online.
0:47:37 Yeah, I’m reaching here.
0:47:38 No, you’re not reaching.
0:47:54 I mean, you know, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was very much on my mind while writing this, and that book famously centers on something called The Entertainment, which is, you know, I guess it’s a film so sort of seductive and alluring that people watch it until they die.
0:48:10 You know, that book was published in 1996, I believe, which is to say long before the internet, as we know it, was codified, but it was, in a sense, self-consciously an internet novel in the sense of prophesying where things were headed.
0:48:14 So I think it was clear even 30 years ago that if given the option, people will kill themselves with entertainment.
0:48:20 Was there a way to design the internet away from these incentives?
0:48:23 I don’t really think so.
0:48:37 I mean, even beyond the killing yourself with stimulation stuff is just the perils of hyperconnection, of putting every single person in the world in touch with each other at the exact same time instantaneously.
0:48:42 And what that does to a culture and to people’s psyches.
0:48:49 I mean, I don’t think we were all meant to be able to access anyone who ever lived at every second.
0:48:50 I mean, it’s just too much.
0:48:51 There’s too many people.
0:48:56 We evolved to live in groups of 30 to 40, 50 people, but that is still the psychology.
0:49:00 Clearly, it’s not having a great impact, and the internet has its uses.
0:49:06 And there’s parts of the internet that I do love, and I don’t want to throw it all out wholesale.
0:49:13 I mean, my life would be completely different if I hadn’t met my friends on Tumblr in my early 20s, if I wasn’t able to post my writing on Twitter.
0:49:20 You take the good with the bad, but I do sometimes wonder, like, would the world be better without any of it?
0:49:37 You do say in the piece that gooning and the social tendencies, some of which we’ve been talking about, that it represents very well might destroy a lot of the things that you value the most in life and in the culture.
0:49:46 What are some of the things you have in mind there, apart from people being patient enough to wait five minutes for the plumber to fix the pipes before having sex and reading novels?
0:49:47 What else might we lose?
0:49:49 What else do you lose?
0:49:53 Well, you lose a way of being in the world.
0:49:59 I mean, I am, and this is partly just temperamental, a hyper-social individual.
0:50:04 You know, I could spend, and do often spend, all day on the phone, all day hanging out with friends.
0:50:13 You know, I feel very lucky to have a kind of neighborhood where there are, like, 30 people that I know sort of a few blocks away from me.
0:50:16 I walk down the street, oh, what’s up?
0:50:18 You go to the coffee shop, you know, you run into people.
0:50:22 To my mind, that’s the ideal way to live and always has been.
0:50:29 And I don’t want to reflexively privilege one way of being in the world over another.
0:50:38 It’s always seemed intuitive to me that being embedded in a rich social context is preferable to being atomized on the internet.
0:50:41 And even the way I’m phrasing it is sort of, you know, tipping the scales a bit.
0:50:45 But why have values if I’m not going to stand by them?
0:50:48 I do think that that is a better way to live.
0:51:09 And I think that the sheer surplus of entertainment, whether it’s crazy montage pornography, whether it’s Netflix shows, whether it’s video games, whether it’s streams of people playing video games, can very easily make a person comfortable with just never leaving their house and with ordering seamless and with ordering groceries and with never going outside.
0:51:16 I mean, I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon or a Luddite or, you know, an 80-year-old man, but I do think that these things are valuable.
0:51:30 I do think that you lose a lot when you cut yourself off from, I don’t know, the rich fabric of existence and instead, you know, pummel yourself in your goon cave.
0:51:33 Again, you don’t have to be gooning in there.
0:51:34 You could just be gaming or whatever.
0:51:38 Yeah, you lose a lot.
0:51:42 I mean, the social aspect is really, that’s genuinely very important to me.
0:51:54 It does really feel like you’re reporting from the end of history, looking back, saying, you know, hey, hey, is this what you want?
0:51:55 Because this is what we’re going to get.
0:51:59 And I know you gesture at this towards the end, right?
0:52:13 But, I mean, again, in my best effort to spray some sunshine, is it possible that we are overstating this, that maybe gooning is just a bizarre subculture?
0:52:23 And we’ve always had bizarre subcultures that it doesn’t really represent anything more than that and doesn’t signal anything larger about the fate of the culture or the species.
0:52:29 I mean, if we’re talking about literal gooning, then no, this is a small, confined community.
0:52:30 I mean, relatively small.
0:52:31 There are a lot of them.
0:52:36 But I don’t think that we’re ever going to reach a critical mass of the population, you know, becoming gooners.
0:52:38 But gooning more broadly understood.
0:52:39 Yeah.
0:52:44 I suppose you could make the argument that this stuff can be good.
0:52:49 I mean, I’m struggling even to come up with a kind of, you know, devil’s advocate counterargument.
0:52:50 I’m sure it exists.
0:52:57 And, you know, to the extent I’m looking at Instagram reels, I’ll often find stuff that is super inventive and funny and interesting.
0:53:00 And clearly, huge amounts of creativity have been unlocked.
0:53:05 I mean, even in the gooning space, a lot of that stuff is genuinely fascinating.
0:53:08 I mean, it’s almost like a kind of abstract video art.
0:53:27 I mean, there’s one gooner I spoke to who made this kind of, like, crazy, I don’t know, leaning into brain rot entertainment where – I mean, entertainment is not quite the word – where it was – you’d have porn in one corner of the screen and video gameplay in the bottom right and a family guy clipping memes and, you know, things flashing, flashing, flashing.
0:53:32 On the one hand, if people are sincerely watching that and not engage with anything else, that’s a huge disaster.
0:53:38 On the other hand, as a kind of meta commentary on content writ large, it was fascinating, and a lot of the gooner stuff was fascinating.
0:53:43 And beyond that, again, on Instagram, on TikTok, a lot of that stuff is hugely inventive.
0:53:46 A lot of people are being creative who wouldn’t have been creative before.
0:53:48 It’s not all bad.
0:53:59 I mean, on the one hand, you can say it’s depressing that we were given these unbelievable communication tools and unbelievable tools of creativity and just use them to basically recreate ourselves, the condition of channel flipping at four in the afternoon.
0:54:04 On the other hand, you can say that there is, again, a lot of great stuff out there.
0:54:08 You nodded a little bit when I used the phrase end of history.
0:54:13 I mean, is that – what did that cue up in your head when I said that?
0:54:16 Is that a way that you thought about this, that this is what it’s come to?
0:54:23 We’ve evolved into a creature that is pure passivity, that is totally atomized, that lives a completely mediated existence.
0:54:26 I get engaged in those doom loops.
0:54:29 I do maintain a sliver of hope.
0:54:30 Well, give me the hope.
0:54:31 We need some hope.
0:54:31 Yeah.
0:54:34 I mean, the hope is twofold.
0:54:42 I mean, the passivity you’re talking about that is obviously, you know, no one’s ever banning these apps, right?
0:54:57 The conditions of passivity we’re discussing in large part certainly have to do with larger social factors, have to do with atomization, with people being unable to find fulfilling, meaningful work, with people being overworked.
0:55:02 And these are things that have political solutions.
0:55:08 I don’t really see any big movement on the horizon to change those conditions.
0:55:12 But they are changeable in theory.
0:55:20 And so there is a world in which passively consuming content becomes less appealing because the conditions of people’s lives are improved.
0:55:30 Now, if that doesn’t happen, and again, things are not looking good on that front, I think that what gave me hope was the idea of boredom.
0:55:50 Because I really do have to think, have to believe that at a certain point, I mean, we’re talking about or have been talking about, you know, chasing more and more and more and more stimulation and engaging with more and more extreme content, more and more extreme in form, more and more extreme in what’s depicted.
0:55:58 I have to hope that at a certain point, at a certain point, you reach the limit.
0:55:59 You would think.
0:56:05 You burn out and, you know, you look around and you think like, oh, where am I?
0:56:06 I’m alone in my room.
0:56:08 You know, I’m unhappy.
0:56:08 I’m bored.
0:56:10 Again, I’m alone.
0:56:18 And from there, decide to open the door, go outside, touch grass, as they say.
0:56:24 And, I don’t know, try to live a different kind of life.
0:56:37 But, again, it would not be because one of these social platforms, you know, whether that’s Meta or whether that’s Pornhub, says, we’re going to try to wean people off of, you know, our content.
0:56:41 It would be because we ourselves decide, I’m bored of this.
0:56:43 I can’t take it anymore.
0:56:44 I’m going to do something else.
0:56:48 Well, we need Hegel to be right.
0:56:54 We need that dialectical pendulum swing back to the before times.
0:56:58 Harper publishes a lot of great stuff.
0:57:07 But this thing that you wrote really broke containment in a way I can’t think of many pieces in recent memory did.
0:57:17 Besides the fact that it is an unbelievable piece of writing, which it is, it’s so good.
0:57:20 It’s one of the best things I’ve read in quite a while.
0:57:21 Thank you so much.
0:57:27 For me, basically, every story is a technological story at this point for a variety of reasons.
0:57:37 But this one really gets to the core of it in a way that only, like, really good literary nonfiction can.
0:57:41 So, kudos to the job well done.
0:57:42 And this has been great.
0:57:43 Thank you for coming on.
0:57:44 Thank you so much.
0:57:45 I really appreciate it.
0:57:53 All right.
0:57:55 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:57:59 I meant everything I said to Daniel there at the end.
0:58:03 This is one of the best pieces I have read in a very long time.
0:58:06 And my God, has it stuck in my head ever since I read it.
0:58:10 And there is just so much to chew on here.
0:58:18 And the piece really does an incredible job at showing how something that seems kind of small and weird and insignificant,
0:58:24 how it actually represents something much broader and significant going on in the culture.
0:58:26 Anyway, I enjoyed it.
0:58:27 I loved talking to him.
0:58:28 I hope you enjoyed it as well.
0:58:31 As always, we do want to know what you think.
0:58:34 So, drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com.
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0:58:56 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Nayala,
0:59:01 fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:59:04 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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