It’s probably more useful to think of a company like Aylo—the owner of Pornhub and most of the other major tube sites, as well as most of the name-brand porn studios—as just another large tech-entertainment giant, like Meta, Netflix, or FanDuel. From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Other gooners engage in “wankbattling,” a kind of competitive feeding in which players rate one another’s porn selections on a ten-point scale. I learned all about it from Fuji, as he called himself, a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian gooner I met while conducting supplementary fieldwork in a wankbattling server on Discord.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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If Instagram was where millennials went to post infographics about racial disparities in income and policing, Discord was where zoomers went to swap the screeds of lesser-known school shooters. Or to talk about gaming. Or whatever zoomers did.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Granted, day-in-the-life TikToks or unboxing videos won’t poison your soul to precisely the same degree as gooner porn. But it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends. Pornosexuals are clearly not the only people out there in the process of retreating from life.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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A lively economy surrounds the production of gooncaps: one Bulgarian teen I spoke with—who took pains to distinguish himself from a real gooner—told me that he and his friends earn a modest living churning out customized gooncaps part-time. He agreed to talk to me because, in his words, “I would like to shed some light on how the moral systems are failing some of the younger people.”
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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So where were the gooners? A few seconds’ research revealed their home base: Discord, a social messaging platform not unlike Slack, offering a multiverse of chat-room servers accessible by invitation.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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What binds these disparate masturbators together, then, are the communal rituals surrounding the goonstate: 70 percent of Questionnaire respondents claimed to engage in one or more of them. By far the most popular of these rituals is “feeding,” a sort of porn-mediated cybersex in which one gooner sustains another’s session by sending them curated porn from their private collection.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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We make our own algorithms, I know, but I don’t think I was uniquely deviant. The situation was the same for nearly every straight man I knew. Invariably this content was intended to funnel the viewer to platforms like OnlyFans, where a paid subscription would allow them to spend even more money on special extras like personalized dick evaluations or nude kitchen-cleaning videos.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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I saluted WristbandGuy’s efforts while suspecting they were futile—roughly equivalent to trying to stave off a tornado by double-locking the front door. Healthy gooning, as any gooner can tell you, is an oxymoron. In this world, I was coming to learn, the degradation is the point.
~ Daniel Kolitz via Harper’s Magazine
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