As for the on-cam streaming stuff, Gooncultist traces it to something called Rabbit, a platform designed to allow users to watch Netflix together, which proto-gooners found their own novel uses for. But as Gooncultist emphasized, any attempt at a comprehensive, linear history of gooning is doomed to failure. Like MAGA, it is a big-tent movement in which many eccentric tendencies have converged.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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The PMV is freebase pornography—porn purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to the brain. These are schizophrenic porn mosaics of often staggering density: hundreds of clips sourced from existing online porn and spliced into productions of just a few minutes’ length, soundtracked by the kind of ludicrous, pounding techno more often associated with unlicensed weed stores.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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You can think of the pornosexual as a species of voluntary celibate, or “volcel.” Like a volcel, the pornosexual chooses not to have sex. Unlike a volcel, the pornosexual does so because their sexual needs are entirely met by pornography, which not a few of them conceive as a kind of “entity” or “goddess” requiring absolute and daily-enacted fealty.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Finding him among this welter of lunatics was a tremendous relief: here, at least, was someone who seemed to acknowledge that what was going on here was strange, that a normal person might find it repellent. Clearly I needed an entrée into this world, someone to ground my investigations; maybe Gooncultist could help. I sent him a message.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Gooncultist himself is fairly ecumenical, as far as gooners go—he has his niche fixations, which I won’t ruin your day by describing, but he seems to dabble in much of what the space has to offer. There are definite camps in Goonworld, as I was quickly coming to learn.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Squint very hard—to the point of risking permanent eye damage—and you can almost see in Goonworld the realization of the Nineties dream of the internet as an incorporeal, judgment-free, gender-fluid sexual playground. But I suspect what these gooners might really be after is—as one Questionnaire respondent put it—“the sense of community” that these spaces offer, this being “something [the] modern world has become increasingly deprived of.”
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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This was supposedly where the online youth were headed: away from their parents’ social platforms into private, self-policed spaces, little islands of affinity. I joined the first relevant server I could find: the GoonVerse, which had more than fifty thousand members.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself. Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults? I find it hard to imagine.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Fuji, from what I can tell, is representative here: someone who identifies as heterosexual and claims to find gay porn “disgusting,” but in whom gooning has unlocked a limited, primarily virtual strain of bi-curiosity, one that manifests in his case as a desire to “dominate” other men in porn-based online trading games.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Before entering, I was prompted to choose my “roles.” Age, region, and gender I could make sense of, but things grew confusing from there. Did I want to be “pinged for tournaments”? Was I a “hentai wankbattler,” or merely a “regular wankbattler”? These questions I answered at random, and then I entered the “stream room.”
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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