Podcast Summary: Search Engine – An Anthropology of Gooning

Host: PJ Vogt
Guest: Daniel Kolitz (Writer, Harper's)
Episode Date: November 12, 2025

Brief Overview

In this episode of Search Engine, host PJ Vogt and guest Daniel Kolitz delve deep into the world of "Gooning," an internet subculture centered around ritualized, often communal, prolonged pornography consumption. Kolitz, who spent a year reporting on the subculture for an article in Harper’s, unpacks the origins, rituals, social hierarchies, and psychological implications of gooning—and explores what its rise reveals about internet culture, masculinity, shame, and overstimulation in the digital age. The conversation oscillates between bemusement, anthropological inquiry, and a broader critique of digital life.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining Gooning and Gooners

• Gooning: Ritualized, prolonged masturbation often spanning hours or longer, where participants aim to reach a "goon state"—a trance- or flow-like altered consciousness focused on pornography.
• Community: While some Gooners practice alone, many participate in online communities via Discord and Twitter (X), engaging in group masturbation, gamified experiences, and content remixing.
  • "Gooning is a kind of ritualized form of prolonged masturbation... trying to reach the goon state by masturbating for sometimes hours, sometimes days at a time."
    — Daniel Kolitz (04:38)

2. Internet Meme vs. Actual Subculture

• Dual Meaning: "Gooning" is both an internet joke—used as slang or insult (akin to "perv")—and a distinct subculture with origins in early pandemic-era Discord communities.
  • "Right now, in online meme culture, gooning is just kind of a synonym for masturbation... That is distinct from this kind of gooning culture."
    — Daniel Kolitz (07:27)

3. The Goon Cave

• Physical Setup: Extreme AV porn lairs with upwards of a dozen screens, projectors, printed porn images, sex toys—sometimes orchestrated for the camera or community.
  • "A goon cave is kind of a porn consumption lair... often multiple screens, projector blasting porn onto the ceiling, quite often printed out and taped up pornographic pictures on the walls..."
    — Daniel Kolitz (08:27)
• Aesthetic: Described as "dark, seedy, abject—possibly on purpose" (12:36).

4. Inside the Goonverse/Discord

• Communal Rituals:
  • Live streaming group masturbation events ("stream rooms").
  • "Hyperkinetic" pornography montages—breakneck, surreal, sometimes AI-generated imagery.
• Tone: Less sexual banter, more "jockey", like a boys' clubhouse (11:21).
  • "Some of them [the Gooners] were talking as if they were gamers—talking shit on each other... Not a gamer myself, but that's what I would imagine gamers sound like."
    — Daniel Kolitz (10:48)

5. Motivations, Profiles, and the “Pornosexual” Identity

• Case Study: “Spishak” (14:49–19:45)

  • A 28-year-old in LA, living with parents, self-identified “pornosexual” (prefers porn and masturbation to sex with real people).
    • "I prefer porn over having sex with a real person. I would rather spend my time masturbating and watching porn versus having sex."
      — Spishak (15:37)
  • Elaborate goon cave described: "Four monitors, eight tablets, overhead projector, porn on the walls, sex toys..." (16:22)
  • Motivated partly by social anxiety and desire to avoid the complications of real human intimacy:
    • "That created so much anxiety that it almost wasn't worth doing."
      — Daniel Kolitz, on Spishak’s feelings (18:58)

• Community Attitude: Members are surprisingly open to media/inquiry—view gooning as a hobby, feel isolated from “mainstream” society but connected online (13:58).

• Demographics: 44% of Gooners surveyed had real-life sexual experiences, but younger Gooners (whose sexuality developed during the pandemic) often had little to none (22:18).

6. Gooner Folk Art: Wank Battling and Porn Music Videos (PMVs)

• “Wank Battling”: Gamified sharing of pornography, where two or more people try to find and share porn that most excites the other, rating each other’s finds (26:43).

  • "Wank battling is kind of a gamified version of feeding where they're raiding the porn that they send to each other..."
    — Daniel Kolitz (27:06)
  • Kolitz describes the activity as “like DJ’ing,” highly stressful, oddly intimate, and bearing similarities to sexual experience (28:21).

• Porn Music Videos (PMVs):

  • Short, highly edited montages of pirated porn synced to music, sometimes with custom-made tracks.
  • Community leader “Noodle Dude” innovated editing techniques syncing thrusts to musical beats (30:13).
    • "...he was editing a PMV and the beat happened to line up with the thrust... and that is now the case in almost every PMV."
      — Daniel Kolitz (30:13)
  • Hosted on dedicated sites like pmvhaven.com due to piracy issues.

• Meta, Humiliation Themes: PMVs often contain captions degrading the viewer—blurring lines between arousal and self-humiliation (33:45).

  • Example:
    "Text flashes on the screen saying, 'You're addicted to porn, you're ruining your life... submit to porn.'"
    — Daniel Kolitz (34:04)

7. Gooning as Digital-Overstimulation Parable

• Broader Implications:

  • Gooners are seen as the most extreme product of a wider culture of digital overstimulation and content addiction.
  • The “goon state” mirrors the overstimulated, non-narrative, channel-surfing mindset cultivated by short-form video on TikTok, YouTube, and more (42:49).
    • "By the time I was done [reporting], it was really a story about just sort of the rise of omnipresent short form, flickering content..."
      — Daniel Kolitz (42:49)
  • For most, the physical or sexual aspect is secondary to the cycle of search and consumption.

• Self-Awareness and Irony:

  • Many Gooners oscillate between ironic detachment and sincerity, using self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism against shame or criticism (36:26).
    • "If you can joke about something, it does sort of make it seem less serious..."
      — Daniel Kolitz (37:08)

• Host’s Reflection:

  • Vogt notes that Gooners’ self-humiliation is not far from the shame everyone feels about time wasted online:
    • "...what Daniel believes is turning them on is in part the gross feeling we all get from Internet overconsumption. The stomach ache that tells us our eyes overate." (37:25)

8. Societal and Psychological Ramifications

• Impact of Porn Abundance:
  • Content abundance is inevitably reshaping young people's sexualities and psychological habits.
    • "There was no world in which you have all of this content out there freely available to everyone from when they were a kid and it would do nothing..."
      — Daniel Kolitz (46:19)
• Gooners as Harbingers:
  • They exist on a continuum with mass digital culture—“the furthest possible extension” of content addiction (44:37).
• Post-literate Anxiety:
  • Kolitz laments the possible extinction of “reading culture,” seeing Gooners as a symptom of slop culture, but also noting a rise in the need for cultural interpreters (49:23).

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the Goon State:
  "By the end of this process, I do believe them... I can certainly see the world falling away and getting single mindedly... focused on your porn world."
  — Daniel Kolitz (06:03)

• On “Goon Caves”:
  "Often a projector blasting porn onto the ceiling, quite often printed out and taped up pornographic pictures on the walls, sex toys, lube..."
  — Daniel Kolitz (08:27)

• On the Vibe in Online Goon Communities:
  “It’s the seediest district of the Internet. Well, that’s probably not true, frankly, but it was a seedy district of the Internet.”
  — Daniel Kolitz (13:20)

• On PMVs and Digital Overstimulation:
  “You watch these porn music videos and it’s hard to understand how someone would find it erotic because you can’t even pay attention to anything. Everything’s moving so quickly... it’s almost more about the abjection and the humiliation of engaging with it in the first place.”
  — Daniel Kolitz (34:15)

• Meta Porn:
  “The main thematic throughline... is like, ruin your life, you’re a disgusting porn addict, give up on society.”
  — Daniel Kolitz (32:55)

• Gooners as Cultural Mirror:
  “They’re the furthest possible extension of something that we all engage in to some degree. They’re like the perfect subject of the content world.”
  — Daniel Kolitz (44:37)

• On the Future:
  “You look at this, you’re like, this is the future staring me in the face... It is like a strobe light of pornography.”
  — Daniel Kolitz (48:07)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:04 — Introduction to guest Daniel Kolitz
• 04:38 — Definition of Gooning and Gooners
• 08:27 — What is a Goon Cave?
• 10:48 — Inside a Discord Goon room
• 14:49 — Meeting Spishak, the “pornosexual”
• 22:18 — Demographics: Gooners’ sexual experience data
• 26:43 — Wank battling and hyper-gamified porn sharing
• 29:22 — PMVs and folk art in the community
• 33:45 — Meta/humiliation themes in gooner content
• 42:49 — Gooning as a metaphor for internet overstimulation
• 49:23 — Discussion about reading, post-literate culture

Conclusion

Kolitz and Vogt’s investigation into the gooning subculture is not merely a lurid journey into a fringe digital scene—it’s a nuanced, surprisingly empathetic exploration of how internet abundance, content addiction, anxiety, and irony are combining to shape new ways of experiencing sexuality, shame, and community. Gooners are depicted as the canaries in the content coal mine, both a curiosity and a warning, trapped in the same always-on, overstimulated internet as the rest of us—but walking a few steps further into the dark.

Further reading:
Daniel Kolitz’s piece in Harper’s: The Goon Squad.
Follow him (or don’t) at X.com/DanielKolitz.

Search Engine is hosted by PJ Vogt.
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