#daniel kolitz

[agnesandhilda]

we need to get the fujoshi industrial complex in on this

The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz

Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation

[kamreadsandrecs]

Gooners, Perverts, and Porn: Two Writers Investigate the Internet's Strangest Subculture

How much sympathy should we have for the pervert? On a panel with writer Tony Tulathimutte at Pioneer Works, the author of the viral gooning

[kammartinez]

Gooners, Perverts, and Porn: Two Writers Investigate the Internet's Strangest Subculture

How much sympathy should we have for the pervert? On a panel with writer Tony Tulathimutte at Pioneer Works, the author of the viral gooning

[absurdlakefront]

The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz

Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation

Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. 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. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

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. 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. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box, about the absurdity of your need for it. What do these companies care? They’ve won. If they have their way—and they usually do—in time we will all be gooners, of a kind.

This isn’t to suggest that we aren’t enthusiastic collaborators in the progressive annihilation of our brains. Nor is it to suggest that, absent attention-shattering social platforms, we’d use the internet solely to keep up with friends and engage in improving hobbies. 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.

It’s not lust; it’s grief without language. A new religion where the body prays to the machine seeking transcendence through repetition and overstimulation.

I can't help but think of Theodor Adorno’s concept of “negative theology” where in a debased culture, transcendence survives only as its absence and the sacred remains in a ruined form felt as longing rather than fulfillment. Apply that concept to pleasure, and you have the gooner: a man chasing ecstasy so mediated, so abstracted from real sensation, that it becomes an act of self-erasure.

[theoriri]

«The Gooneral’s attendees didn’t care that Malone was, from all available evidence, not a gooner at all but rather an unaffiliated, lone-wolf pervert. That he’d been, in their eyes, martyred for a form of self-expression was enough to make him a cause célèbre for what was increasingly coming to feel like a movement, a homegrown zoomer Tea Party that might one day produce its own gooner congressmen, gooner news networks, extremist gooner terror attacks.»

— https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/

[zangtumb]

thedatadrive.com - Daniel Kolitz      

[apothecarienne]

There are a few extremely important photos from my life that come from this very silly man's flip phone camera.

[hyperallergic]

Welcome to 2016. Mark Zuckerberg has stolen our data, fleeing Facebook’s offices in Menlo Park with a mysterious, “charismatic hustler” known as Maurice Carbonneau. Now known as a conceptual art terrorist, he’s been spotted somewhere in East Texas, and the social network is in the hands of Buck “The Onion King” Calhoun, a “straight-shootin’, bear-skinnin’, pistol-twirlin’, high-cholestrol-havin'” former vendor of sturdy mattresses who loves steaks and big sombreros. In this near future, Facebook is drained of information, but we can give back by donating to its ongoing Data Drive, which needs to raise 100 petabytes — just 100,000,000 gigabytes — to keep us all plugged into each others’ lives.

This Collaged Facebook Parody Needs Your Data