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........

© Vox