Key takeaways

• The GoonVerse is a porn-centered subculture, but its real significance is how it exposes the internet’s broader shift toward constant, high-intensity stimulation.
• The hyper-edited content at the center of gooning mirrors the attention-fracturing mechanics of mainstream platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
• Seen through this lens, gooning becomes a funhouse-mirror version of modern screen life, revealing how easily stimulation can replace narrative, patience, and deeper forms of connection.

Open the internet today, and you’ll find entire worlds most of us never encounter. Spaces built around practices so strange, so hyper-specific, they read like satire at first glance.

One of the most unsettling of these worlds calls itself the GoonVerse. It’s a digital subculture organized around endless pornography and what can only be described as ritualized masturbation. The surface is absurd. The deeper story is not. GoonVerse is a distorted mirror held up to the rest of us, a warning about what happens to a culture — and to our own minds — when constant stimulation becomes the only reliable source of comfort.

Few writers have explored this frontier more vividly than Daniel Kolitz. His Harper’s essay, “The Goon Squad,” is part ethnography, part cultural diagnosis, and part prophecy about where the internet may be taking all of us. I invited Kolitz onto The Gray Area to talk about what he discovered inside these communities and what “gooning” — he’ll explain below — reveals about the rest of us.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your simplest definition of gooning?

Gooning is really two things. On one level, it’s a new way of masturbating that’s built around edging. If people aren’t familiar with the term, edging is when you bring yourself to the point of climax without climaxing. The goal is to hold that heightened state for as long as possible.

Gooners push that to extremes. They edge for hours, sometimes for days, trying to reach what they call the “goon state,” a kind of masturbation nirvana. They describe it as total bliss, where the world falls away and they’re fully immersed in pornography. Some people compare it to advanced meditation, except the object of focus is porn.

The second meaning is communal. Gooning is also the online subculture that’s formed around this practice. There are big Discord servers and Twitter pockets where gooners gather. They goon together on camera, play porn-themed games, trade porn, talk about porn. Some of it’s ironic, some of it’s role play, and some of it is very sincere. Many present themselves as extreme porn addicts who openly embrace being consumed by porn.

**Why did you think something this weird and fringe was worth writing about? **

At the surface level, the sheer luridness is fascinating. Once you enter these spaces, you find an incredibly elaborate vocabulary and subculture. Not just “goon state” but “goon fuel,” “goon caves,” all these niche terms. You look around and think, Someone needs to document this.

But there were bigger forces pulling me in. When I started reporting, softcore content was exploding on major social platforms and funneling people toward OnlyFans. I wasn’t scandalized, but I did find it striking that I could open Instagram in the afternoon and basically be served porn.

When you logged into these Discords, what did you see that stunned you?

One of the first servers I entered was called the GoonVerse, which had around 50,000 members when I joined. That’s huge for such a niche porn community. I clicked on a stream without knowing what to expect, and it looked like a Zoom call where every square was a different person masturbating to the same video. The camera frames were neck down, but everyone was enthusiastically going at it while chatting together.

And the porn itself wasn’t normal porn. It was hyper-edited, rapid-fire montage. Nothing stayed onscreen for more than a second or two. The cuts were constant. The pacing was frantic. It felt like a sensory assault. That was my entry point, and it was so bizarre that I had to understand who these people were.

You start digging around, talking to people, trying to understand how this fits into their lives. And a lot of them wanted to talk. This wasn’t like pulling teeth.

Not at all. They were thrilled. And that surprised me. This isn’t something you can talk about at work or at a family dinner. You can’t say, I spent the weekend in my goon cave. So you end up with this huge part of your life that’s basically unspeakable.

And for many of them, it really is a hobby. They invest money in gear, spend tons of time, form friendships. It’s a lifestyle. But it’s a lifestyle you can’t explain to anyone outside the community. So when someone shows up and says, I’ll listen and you’ll be anonymous, people open up. Many seemed relieved to finally talk about what had taken over so much of their mental space.

You use the word “hobby.” Is that how most gooners think of it? Is this a hobby, an identity, a lifestyle, an addiction?

It’s complicated. Start with the addiction piece. The whole conceit of being a gooner is that you’re addicted to porn. Gooning is a kink where the kink is the idea that you’re a hopeless porn addict. People fantasize about worlds completely dominated by porn, like porn on billboards in Times Square. It’s a kind of meta pornography.

But this overlaps with real debates about addiction. There’s a big argument, both in academia and in amateur anti-masturbation circles, about whether porn addiction is a meaningful clinical diagnosis. The mainstream view right now is that porn use doesn’t fit the established criteria for addiction the way heroin or gambling does. Studies often show that people’s sense of being addicted tracks closely with how ashamed they feel.

So the line between hobby and addiction is blurry. And when the digital economy is engineered to make us dependent on stimulation, it’s hard to know where that line even is. Gooners lean into this ambiguity. It’s a hobby, an identity, a lifestyle, and in many cases, it feels like an addiction, whether or not a clinician would call it that.

You assumed, and I would’ve assumed, that most of these people would be deeply maladjusted incel types. But you say a lot of them were “distressingly normal.” What was distressing about the normality?

They didn’t fit the stereotype. They weren’t frothing misogynists. They weren’t socially incoherent. Most were twenty-somethings who were polite, self-aware, sometimes even sweet. That made it more unsettling, because it forced me to abandon the idea that this was just fringe pathology.

It doesn’t mean nothing troubling was happening. There are ethical questions around porn and objectification. But if the incel stance is “I hate women because they won’t sleep with me,” the gooner stance is closer to, “I can’t get a date, that’s fine, I love women anyway, and I’ll masturbate for 15 hours.” It’s less outward anger and more a surrender to the screen.

How many of the gooners you talked to still have sex with actual people?

In my questionnaire, over 100 people responded. Roughly 40 percent said they were sexually active in some capacity. That could mean a lot of things, but the majority identified as “pornosexual,” which means they have no real interest in physical sex. Porn is their sex life.

For some, that’s tied to a nihilistic posture. They eroticize being unlovable or broken. For others, it’s framed as stability. They say, I work out, I have my games, my friends, my porn, and I avoid romantic relationships because they’re too chaotic.

Older gooners were more likely to have relationships. Younger ones, raised entirely online, often said they had no interest in sex at all. There’s that guy in the piece who says he can’t have sex because he can’t tolerate not knowing what’s in someone else’s mind. That feels incredibly specific to this era.

That level of inwardness only happens when your entire social world is mediated. When you interact primarily through screens, you get used to hyper-controlled communication. So the ambiguity of real relationships becomes terrifying. Younger gooners grew up in curated digital spaces. They have gaming friends, Discord circles, parasocial bonds with creators, and porn that never talks back. Real relationships feel not just hard but unnecessary.

This is where the story becomes about a lot more than porn. When did you realize you were looking at a funhouse mirror for the whole attention economy?

Last winter, when I was at peak goon anthropology. I’d wake up dreading the day because I knew I’d be opening my laptop and immersing myself in PMVs [porn music videos] and Discord streams. I watched hundreds of PMVs. I could feel my brain decaying. It wasn’t just the porn. It was the editing, the pace, the inability to rest on a single image.

And then I started noticing the same dynamic everywhere. On the subway, people weren’t reading. They were watching TikToks or* Family Guy *clips or gameplay replays. Video was swallowing everything. The stimulation wasn’t unique to porn. It was built into every platform.

Around that time, a friend gave me Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman was writing about television decades ago, arguing that a visual culture erodes our ability to sustain attention. He worried about Sesame Street. Now we’ve taken those concerns and put them on steroids.

So you start asking, how different is gooning from the way the rest of us use the internet? If you set the masturbation aside, how different is it from compulsively watching YouTube or binging Netflix?

Fundamentally, it’s not. If you zoom out and look at what the person is doing physically, they’re sitting in front of a screen chasing stimulation. The content matters less than the behavior.

The mechanics are identical. Infinite scroll, the dopamine hit of the next thing, the constant craving for novelty.

PMVs are just the most stimulating version of that. They’re freebasing content. And when platforms started allowing more softcore content, that wasn’t surprising. If your goal is engagement, porn is the most potent tool. Gooning just takes that logic and strips away the pretense.

Is this where the internet was always going? Was gooning inevitable?

We’ve always had the capacity to destroy ourselves with entertainment. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest imagines a film so pleasurable people watch it until they die. That book came out before the modern internet.

Once you can produce endless stimulation, it’ll be exploited. Maybe the internet could’ve been designed differently at the edges. But a global system that connects everyone instantly was always going to tilt toward hyperstimulation. I don’t want to erase the good. The internet shaped my friendships and my career. But the same tools that create connection also create this.