Internet Addiction: How the Goon Subculture Reflects Society's Attention Crisis.

Key Takeaways

• GoonVerse is a subculture centered around pornography, but its true significance lies in how it underscores a broader shift in the internet towards constant, intense stimulation.
• Hyperedited content that is at the heart of gooning reflects the attention fragmentation mechanics of popular platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
• When viewed through this lens, gooning becomes a kind of distorted mirror of modern digital life, revealing how easily stimulation can replace narrative, patience, and deeper forms of connection.

According to Vox: Today, the internet holds entire worlds that most of us aren’t even aware of. Programs focusing on strange and specific practices may seem, at first glance, satirical.

One of the most concerning such worlds is called GoonVerse. It is a digital subculture revolving around endless pornography and ritualized masturbation. At first glance, it seems absurd, but a deeper story reveals otherwise. GoonVerse is a distorted mirror of our culture, showing what changes occur in our minds when constant stimulation becomes the only reliable source of comfort.

Daniel Kolitz vividly explores this territory in his essay for Harper’s 'The Goon Squad'. It is part ethnography, part cultural diagnosis, and a prophecy of where the internet may lead. I invited Kolitz to The Gray Area to discuss his findings about these communities and what 'gooning' reveals about us.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

What’s your simplest definition of gooning?

Gooning has two meanings. First, it’s a new way of masturbating based on the method of 'edging'. If someone doesn’t know what edging is, it is the practice of bringing oneself to the brink of climax without actually achieving it. The goal is to maintain this heightened state for as long as possible.

Gooners take this to extremes. They engage in 'edging' for hours, sometimes days, attempting to reach their 'goon state' – a special state akin to the nirvana of masturbation. They describe it as absolute bliss where the world disappears and they are fully immersed in pornography. Some compare it to meditation, except the focus object is porn.

Secondly, gooning is also an online subculture that has formed around this practice. There are large Discord servers and Twitter groups where gooners gather. They 'goon together' on camera, play porn-themed games, exchange porn, and discuss it. Part of this is ironic, part role-play, and some of it is completely sincere. Many openly consider themselves porn addicts.

Why did you think this strange and marginal phenomenon deserves attention?

On a surface level, the shocking nature of this phenomenon is striking. Once you enter these spaces, you find an extremely complex lexicon and subculture with its terms, such as 'goon state' or 'goon fuel'. You look around and think: Someone needs to document this.

But there were larger forces at play that drew me in. When I began researching this topic, I noticed how soft content was rapidly evolving on mainstream platforms such as OnlyFans. I was not outraged but struck by the possibility of receiving porn on Instagram any time.

When you logged onto these Discord servers, what amazed you?

One of the first servers I joined was called GoonVerse, and at the time of my joining, there were about 50,000 participants. I clicked on a stream, and it looked like a Zoom call where each square zone was another person masturbating to the same video. The cameras only captured from the neck down, but everyone was ecstatic and actively engaged in discussion.

The pornography shown there was particularly aggressive. It consisted of hyperedited, rapid-fire montages, with nothing staying on the screen for more than a second. The pacing was insane. It felt like a sensory assault. It was my entry point, and I had to understand who these people were.

You began to ask people about their lives. Many wanted to talk. It didn’t seem exhausting.

Not at all. They were enthusiastic, and that surprised me. This isn’t something you can talk about at work or over family dinner. You can’t say: I spent my weekend in my goon cave. You have a huge part of your life that no one is interested in.

For many of them, it really became a supportive hobby. They invest money in equipment, spend a lot of time, and form friendships. It is a lifestyle that cannot be explained from the outside. When someone comes and says: I’ll listen, and you’ll remain anonymous, people open up. Many were relieved to finally have a chance to talk about what occupies a large part of their attention.

You use the word 'hobby'. Do most gooners consider it to be so? Is it a hobby, an identity, or an addiction?

It’s not straightforward. Regarding addiction, the gooner concept is that you are addicted to porn. Gooning is the kink of being addicted to porn. People envision worlds where porn rules billboards in Times Square. This is meta-pornography.

But it’s tied to real discussions about addiction. In academic settings and circles that oppose masturbation, there are debates over whether porn addiction is a clinically significant diagnosis. To date, it is believed that porn usage does not meet addiction criteria, as heroin or gambling does. Studies often show that people’s feelings of addiction intertwine with feelings of shame.

So the line between hobby and addiction is blurred. And when the digital economy is designed to make us addicted to stimulation, it’s hard to determine where that line is drawn. Gooners inhabit that border. It’s a hobby, an identity, a lifestyle, and in many cases it feels like an addiction, whether clinicians recognize it or not.

You suggested that most of these people would be deeply invisible. Yet you say many were 'alarmingly normal.' What was alarming about this normality?

They didn’t fit stereotypes. They weren’t aggressive misogynists or socially awkward. Many of them are young, polite, self-aware people. This calls into question whether this is merely a marginal phenomenon.

This doesn’t mean it’s all safe. There are ethical questions surrounding porn and objectification. If the 'incel' perspective sounds like 'I hate women because they don’t want to sleep with me,' the gooner’s position is closer to 'I can’t find a date and love women, so I’ll just masturbate for 15 hours.' It’s not so much anger, but submission to the screens.

How many gooners you spoke with still have relationships with real people?

In my survey, over 100 individuals responded. About 40% of them indicated that they are at least somewhat sexually active. Many identified as 'pornosexuals', meaning they have no real interest in physical sex. For them, porn is their sex life.

For some, it comes with a nihilistic attitude. They seek a substitute for relationships in porn. Others consider it a stable choice. They say: 'I’m into sports, I have my games and friends, my porn, and I avoid romantic relationships.'

Older gooners tend to have relationships. Younger ones, raised exclusively online, often say they have no interest in sex. There’s a character in your text who says he can’t have sex because he can’t handle the uncertainty in someone else’s mind. This is very specific to this era.

This level of introspection is only possible when your entire social world is tied to the internet. Interacting through screens causes you to get used to hyper-controlled communication, and thus the uncertainty of real relationships becomes frightening. Younger gooners grew up in curated digital spaces, have friends in games, communicate on Discord, and form parasocial connections with creators and pornography, who never converse back.

This is more than just about porn. When did you realize you were looking at a distorted mirror for the entire attention economy?

Last winter when I was exploring goon culture. I would wake up afraid that the day would be overwhelming, knowing I would open my laptop and dive into PMVs [porn music videos] and streams on Discord. I watched hundreds of PMVs. I felt my brain breaking. It’s not just porn. It’s the pace, the editing, the inability to stop on a single image.

And I began to notice this dynamic everywhere. On the subway, people aren’t reading books but scrolling through TikTok or replays of games. Stimulation is built into every platform.

One of my friends gave me Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman wrote about television, arguing that visual culture impedes our ability to sustain attention. He worried about 'Sesame Street'. Now, this problem has intensified.

So you start asking, how different is gooning from the way we use the internet? If you set aside masturbation, how is it different from binge-watching YouTube or Netflix?

Overall, it’s not different. A person just sits in front of a screen seeking stimulation. The content weighs less than the behavior itself.

The mechanics are the same: endless scrolling and the desire for novelty.

PMVs are just a more intense version of this. They are a direct addiction to content. And with the emergence of platforms allowing soft content, this has become a sensation. If the goal is engagement, porn is the strongest temptation. Gooning simply simplifies this logic.

Is this where the internet has always been heading? Was gooning inevitable?

We have always had the capacity to destroy ourselves with entertainment. David Foster Wallace in his Infinite Jest imagines a movie so enjoyable that people watch it to death. This book was published long before the rise of the modern internet.

If there is a possibility to create infinite stimulation, it will be exploited. Perhaps the internet could have been designed differently, but the global system that connects people instantly will always skew towards hyper-stimulation. I am not here to destroy all the good things. The internet has shaped my friendships and career. However, the very tools that create connection are also capable of eliciting this.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and subscribe to The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora or wherever you listen to podcasts.