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The Goon Squad

anon_feze said in #4673 5d ago: received

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

Very high quality new journalism style essay about the gooniverse and what I feel should be called hyperporn. Even as a terminally online zoomer, I had no idea things were this bad. Obviously this represents immense social decay and reeks of Landian horror, but there’s one claim in particular in the conclusion that I’d like to use as a jumping-off point: was this all predestined by networked computing?

I personally think the answer is a definitive yes. As soon as bits can flow over wires and the rate gets something like a Moore’s Law, it becomes inevitable that eventually the gamut of human appetites can be satisfied by artifices coming out of that wire. The more difficult question, to me, is what is the limit behavior? What does this approach? Will it be forever ghettoized to discord servers or will it become so mainstream that every young person alive participates in it (at least in part)?

referenced by: >>4674

Very high quality ne received

anon_tagw said in #4674 5d ago: received

>>4673
Dopamine reward hacking is the teleological end of mass democratic industrial society. Still, avoiding dopamine traps is a learnable skill, and there will be strong selection pressures for those with the capability to avoid getting oneshotted by this stuff.

There are some really crazy aspects to the gooncult that make me compare it more to ecstatic mystery cults than conventional pleasure-seeking behavior. The goon-state is almost certainly real, and probably something like a jhana state.

Cf. Meltdown (https://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm) and In My Zombie Era (https://substack.com/@samkriss/p-166859722)

Dopamine reward hack received

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