Theory of the Gooner: Baudrillard vs Lacan // 229

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The Pill Pod reads Daniel Kolitz' anthropology of the gooners in Harper's Magazine https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/ and we find it's all connected man

Other sources cited included Lacan Seminar X, Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Baudrillard Transparency of Evil

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
All right, hey, gentlemen, I.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Thought we were leaving off with the psychoanalysis.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
We needed to get back to the real world after
eight or nine theory heavy episodes. We need to get
back to normal reality. And who was waiting for us
there a bunch.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Of goods corners.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
I also was going to say, we just spent all
this time thinking through Lacinian psychoanalysis. And I mean, we
have this tool belt, shall we say, of theory, and
why not now use it to make sense of the
real world, which is the real world.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
We've chosen the real world is discord? Is discord discord? Yeah,
I had heard what gooning was. People started saying about
five months ago, like gooning, and I thought it was
like jacking off.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
I didn't even know that, which it basically is.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
This article was illuminating, well written. We were just complimenting
it before we hit the button.

Speaker 4 (01:15):
It's a fun one.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Written by Daniel Kollitz for for Harper's Magazine. We should
probably do a content warning if you if you're listening
to the pill pod with your kids in.

Speaker 4 (01:28):
The car, well, most probably don't do that. A.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Don't do that, B especially especially don't do that today.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Not not safe for work.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Make sure it's still in the redemption of the world
and you feel like your your soul has been unspotted.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
Also, yeah, this was this was shocking stuff. This was
fascinating and shocking.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
And just weird. I I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
The Goon squad too, what's we were into.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Some we were into some weird stuff. Well, I'm sure
we all were when we were young, and so like,
it's just interesting now to see like what the zoomers
weird stuff are getting they're getting into.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
I feel like this is the most significant piece of
anthropology I have read in years. This is now, this
is the modern Levey Strauss to me, Yeah, it was
it the author this is a trend in journalism long
form these days, but to like put yourself in the
story and say first sight when here I met this

(02:29):
person and he describes just sliding into depression during this
several months assignment studying Discord Goon years. So we thank
you for your service. Daniel Kolitz.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Yeah, an amazing piece of writing and an amazing piece
of journalism. Investigative perhaps like slightly gonezo ish journalism, but
not alo. But it had a gonzo ish aspects.

Speaker 3 (02:55):
It's old school vice style.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
That's right, Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, So we should probably
define what the hell it is we're talking about here
with goony unless.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
And why we're talking about it of all things, you know.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
And also do you like, why are we talking? I
had no idea what it was. But do you think
the high percentage of our audience does.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
I would think a higher percentage than a random selection.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
Of the of the population, the terminally online crowd might
know if we have anybody skewing in that direction.

Speaker 4 (03:29):
Which we probably do.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
We're old, man, we weren't. We weren't that old when
we started this, but this, this showed our age.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, apparently this this went This went pretty viral and
I missed it. But this whole thing went pretty viral
because of a certain incident with a certain someone who
was masturbating in public at what was it at, like
a at a coffee shop? No, at a drive at

(03:56):
a bikini beans, which I've never heard of.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
They're just asking for you to masturbate there with a
name like that.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, it's like, is it like Hooters? I guess that's
another one.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
I guess.

Speaker 5 (04:07):
Yeah, I was confused by that kind of a Hooters
type coffee joint. Yeah, Hooters concept applied to Like if
you took a Hooters and a Starbucks and put them together,
you get bikini beans.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
I guess.

Speaker 4 (04:23):
Actually in Chile, there's a really weird thing that's been
going on since the sixties, I think or seventies. It's
like an old school tradition of these coffee shops and
they would call it coffee with legs, and you'd go
in and it would be all these like attractive women
with like tight clothing and you could end like mini skirts.
Really weird old school thing in Chili.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Just putting the quiet part of the service industry out loud.

Speaker 4 (04:49):
Yeah, And I think it's because coffee sucked back then,
so like the only way to get people to drink
coffee was to like have attractive women. I don't know
that's the story I heard anyway about it. But let's
talk about goony find.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Who to thunk that sex sells?

Speaker 3 (05:03):
Daniel laid out so much evidence here for things that
I don't that we find relevant. I don't even know
if he if he found it as relevant as we
are about to. But the the cult aspects, the object
desire aspects, I think you can get whatever you think
gooning is. It's much more than that, I think, is
what I learned at least, this is yeah, this is

(05:24):
an extremist cult. And of course Bodyard predicted it, as
he predicted everything that's been happening thus far in the
twenty twenties. But we are coming off a big Lacan glut,
so we might use a lacan as more of our
reference point. But all the I was shocked by all
the spiritual imagery, the the it's it's not intended to

(05:46):
be a parody of religion, but there's shrines, there's church.
At one point one of them says that pornography is
a goddess.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
And there's clearly a martyr involved as well, a.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Martyr an a ritual whatever you call it, where they
mark his gravesite and unary procession.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
I have a couple of little like notes just to
define it if we want. I think gooning is an
it's an extreme state of edging, right, so bringing yourself
repeatedly to the brink of orgasm without climax. And apparently
the goal is to reach the goon state described as
total ego death, maybe like bliss, some kind of weird

(06:30):
religious like transcendence.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Six feet from the edge like the ocean, and.

Speaker 4 (06:35):
They share a kind of religious vocabulary. They talk about
like the zone, the goon state, feeding goon fuel, which
is like more types of porn to fuel gooning, and
then so and and then this this shows up as
hours spent kind of like maybe even days according to legend.

(06:56):
I guess masturbating in the community often I've streaming it
or chatting with other gooners while doing it.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
Like a Maratha of edge.

Speaker 4 (07:07):
Described as kind of a distinct gen Z culture. And
there was actually a funny line in the article where
I felt like the author was was like making a
really extreme contrast between millennials and gen Z. Like near
the beginning, he's like, if Instagram was where millennials went
to post infographics about racial disparities and income and policing

(07:31):
discord was where zoomers went to swap the screeds of
lesser known school shooters or talk about gaming or whatever
zoomers did, or apparently gooning as later it comes up
in the article. But I just felt that that line
kind of made me crack up, just because he just
made millennials seem so much better than gen z earth so.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Much more normal by comparison normal but like neurotic.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
I as a I don't think any of us could
imagine ever master with another guy in the room's.

Speaker 4 (08:02):
Or like live streaming it with a bunch of others.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
Goon cave. Goon cave was a term also that we learned,
which is setting up as many screens as possible, up
to four monitors plus your phone, plus several tablets, all
of which are all playing pornography at the same time.
And they have invented new types of pornography. Uh yeah,

(08:30):
it's what does he describe it as? He calls it
free base pornography, So.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Like a heroin reference.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
PMB a crack yeah yeah, PMB is a porn music video,
so he says, the PMB is free base pornography, porn
purified of anything that might disrupt its swift passage to
the brain. There are schizophrenic porn mosaics of often staggering density.
Hundreds of clips source from existing online porn and spliced

(09:00):
into productions of just a few minutes length, soundtracked by
the kind of ludicrous, pounding techno music more often associated
with unlicensed weed stores. I don't know that weed stores
playtechno music at least not here. Some contain yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
There's no unlicensed weed stores in Canada.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
Some contain seizure warnings. Others contain prompts to inhale paupers
and for how long many appear? Beamed in from some
future gooner republic, a screen enclosed world of rigorous illiteracy
in which all human exchanges, from restaurant orders to marriage proposals,
take the form of elaborate pornographic gift trading, and all

(09:41):
the gooners love them. They can't get enough of them.
So this is yeah, this is the new medium, which
is porn with techno. I actually I have to admit
that I checked one out. It was three minutes long.
I couldn't make it to the end because about two
thirds of the way through it just started showing like gay.

Speaker 4 (10:04):
Porn, oh weird, no warning.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
And there was all the step. Well, first it started
with like just a video of a guy masturbating, but
the screen was split into three, so there's there's females
on the side, or the same female twice duplicated, and
it started the whole video is the screen divided into three,
and then about two minutes in like no warning, unannounced.

(10:29):
Then there's just like there's gay stuff. So I was like, whoa, okay,
that was my one experience with a PMV. The fact
that that's even mixed in that there's just like no
distinction between what are very clearly supposed to be different genres,
at least for a Eurotic.

Speaker 4 (10:49):
Yeah, well that's interesting because there was Yeah, Somewhere in
the middle of the article he talks about how there
is a kind of subtext in the gooning community of
like yeah, like like gender sexual fluidity and and like
even the way they talk about each other like gooning together,

(11:11):
like there's kind of a homoerotic uh, sort of like
definitely like homosocial homoerotics sort of subtext to it. And
at one point, I think the author even says, you know,
if you were squinting hard enough, maybe that was or
like this might look like what in the early two
thousands kind of you know, really really progressive activists said, oh,

(11:32):
like the Internet will help us create this kind of
like post sexual utopia, right where like like where these
kinds of like binary norms, right, gender binary norms and
sexuality binary norms sort of dissolve and you know he's
saying like in a way, but then when you like
stop squinting, it's actually you realize it's actually like a nightmare,
this thing that they created. But there is like kind

(11:53):
of this weird aspect of it, which, yeah, is interesting
and like maybe like them and I guess I would say,
like that part didn't seem to me even close to
the most disturbing part.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Of it, right, Oh no, No, this is prefigured by
Charlie Sheen, you know, winning, winning, Yeah, he's doing so much,
doing so much crack that he just started fucking guys
after a while. The desensitization is a real is a
real thing, it seems here.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Well you know what Freud u for someone to bring
in some of that language. Right. Actually, before you guys
even just started saying this about the fluidity thing, I
was thinking, you know, this is like an extreme choice
of sexual aim, That's what it is. Right. Remember Freud's
distinction between like sexual object and sexual aim, Like your

(12:44):
your object is the person or the thing that you're
attracted to, So like in a heterosexual you know context,
the sexual object is the woman, but the sexual aim
is the is the means of satisfaction. The means by
which you seek satisfaction. It's like the object completely doesn't

(13:05):
matter anymore. It's all about the aim. Yeah, it's just
this extreme choice of sexual aim, like edging for days.

Speaker 4 (13:14):
Like what the hell, perpetually like a.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Like a marathon.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, maybe we can mix our theories together here, because
I was working on something that I never finished. But
I think it aligns with what you're saying, and that's
this seems to me to be like anti sexual or
maybe maybe post sexual would be a better term, because
if they're trying to arrive, if the purpose of all

(13:40):
of this masturbating is to arrive at the goon state,
this is actually not an active poiesis. It's an act
of praxis. You heard it here first. Gooning is an
act of as an act of praxis. But if there
is an aim, like you said, it's to a really
it's to reach what they call it like nirvana ego

(14:02):
death goon state where you're no longer like part of
your body anymore. So it's a profound it's like a
death drive.

Speaker 4 (14:09):
Yeah, it is death drive. I definitely was thinking about
the death drive. I also thought, like, before we get
too deep into theorizing, is it also worth just adding
the context that this sort of started and accelerated because
of the pandemic, because I think that's you know, insofar
as this is very baffling and doesn't really make sense
to us, our millennial ears, I just think like adding

(14:31):
the context that this emerged in the pandemic sort of
makes a lot of sense. Like if something weird like
this is going to is going to show up, it's like, well,
when all these kids who would have been at college
or at high school hanging out with their friends, they're
now stuck at home, and what are they going to do?
They're like, they've got all these hormones. They start watching
porn and then I mean it's not to say that
this wouldn't have maybe emerged at some subculture anyway, but

(14:54):
it just seems like the pandemic added fuel to anything
like this, which is just people alone at home with
each other on the internet, talking to each other.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
And they're very free about it. The goon cave thing,
they share it freely.

Speaker 4 (15:07):
Yeah, they share the pictures of their cave, the number
of monitors they have, all the different sex toys they have,
the fleshlights, all this crazy shit. That they they're just
showing it off.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
Like it's very liberated.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
This is the most shocking part of it for me
is that you're not you're not suppressing at all.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
No, there's no shame, there's no shame involved. It's it's
like a competition.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:29):
Yeah, they want to show off, like how how much
sicker their their goon cave is. It was funny one
I remember at one point in the article he was like,
because he talks to a bunch of these gooners, right,
just to so the audience is aware, like the author
found it. And then he's like, well, I got to
seek these people out. I gotta find them. So we
talked to a bunch of them and even did some surveys. Uh.

(15:49):
And one of them that he talked to like described
his like multi screen setup and blackout window shades and
you know, for toys and all the stuff he has.
But then he's like, I've got to take it apart
and put it back together every time. Because he still
lives with his parents. He's like and he's like, one
day I'll be able to have my permanent goon cave,

(16:11):
but for now, it's like a temporary thing that folds away.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Those as man one day, assuming that they're never going
to grow out of it. You no more fun? Will
it be? Will it be fun at that point?

Speaker 3 (16:25):
Will it will?

Speaker 2 (16:26):
I don't know if you can have your own permanent
goon cave. It's like now, I rather wouldn't because it's
not it's no work. It's too easy. Now, I don't
know that's commitment though.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
If we included in the causal chain there is uh,
of course COVID plus the Internet plus all the versions
of porn that are that currently exist makes me realize
how out of the game I was. I didn't recognize
any of these references or names.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
I've heard of porn music videos before.

Speaker 4 (16:58):
I've never even heard of that. I mean, it doesn't
surprise me that it exists, obviously, And it also doesn't
surprise me that like with TikTok, with TikTok and and
like this kind of instant model of stimulation of just
like instant, like next one, next one, like like this
lack of attention that of course that would transfer over
over to porn. It like it's funny. It reminds me

(17:20):
of like a lot I don't know, A long time ago.
I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine,
you know, one of those guy conversations, right, and it's
like talking about what kind of porn you like or whatever,
And I remember he was he was. He just said, like,
I just get right down to business with the compilations, right,
And it's funny, like like like, the reason I find
that funny is because I think that his goal is

(17:40):
like the opposite of this, right, It's like I just
want to get right, I just want to get it
over with. I just want to finish. It's like this,
it's like the diametric opposite.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
It's like I just want to get create to the
climax exactly. That's like starting Lord of the Rings, like
in the middle of Helm's Deep.

Speaker 4 (17:56):
Yeah, exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
It's another reason why I said this. I said anti
sexual before I think I want to change it to
post sexual, which I we're in the middle of the
theory here, but like the old porn, normal porn, I
would call it, but just normal porn is like there's
a scene and the scene unfolds between it's a very
stupid veneer of a story. But it's like, uh, there's

(18:21):
a seduction and a game and all the pizza guys
coming over to the fuck her, or the step brothers
hiding in the closet like all this shit. But this
is this is sexuality marked by a certain process that
has like a narrative arc that that mirrors dating sexual relationships,

(18:43):
like there's a seduction and there's a game and there's
a process, and that the end is worth it because
you have to go through the steps the narrative arc
to arrive with that. But this post sexually it has
it has like more in common with religion then then
with sex because it hates sex and it's it's like

(19:05):
sex is purely instrumental. You should only like Catholics think
you should only have sex if you're going to produce offspring.
This uses sex as the like the Jacob's ladder up
to the state of Nirvana.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, I mean, well, the narrative that you were talking
about was like an excuse, Like there's there's this assumption
that you're there, you're gonna be guilty about this, and
it's like, oh, but there's still a narrative to it.
So it's like it's not like I'm just watching like
naked people having sex. There's like something going on. It
was like the flimsiest of excuses, but it was there.

(19:41):
Now that the porn music video, as he says, it's
just freebase again. There's no more even, there's no not
even the charade that there's like some kind of story here.
I mean to be fair, though, I'm pretty sure the
narrative died with dial up. Like you're you're at home.

(20:02):
Millennials might remember being at home in the nineties, very
very late at night, waiting for like the porn shows
to come on at like two am. Those are the
ones like Baby Blue that had like the pool guy
coming over to fix the pool while the husband's out,
kind of like or the mechanics sees the lady playing
pool and is going to show her some moves and.

Speaker 3 (20:23):
That, like you know, and you got to wait two hours.
You wait two fucking hours for that one sex scene.
It's the same as when you're downloading it off of
kaza and it's.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Like and it's like so soft core you're watching from
the bushes outside. It's crazy.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
The video is like two forty p and it takes
four hours to download, So you know, that's all part
of the build up. Now there's just no there's no
build up anymore, which the free base aspect of this
build up is all in the edging. Now, yeah, there's
no there's no there's no fantasy. It's almost inhuman, right, It's.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Just a test.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
It's like a test of your self control. And it's mechanism.
It's just the mechanics of like a dick ramming into
whatever whatever hole there is. So it's funny that the
purpose becomes like this athureal state because all the fantasy
has been stripped off.

Speaker 4 (21:18):
Of the.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
Narrative that we're describing, the fantasy that drapes that gives
meaning to the climactic event. Gooners don't have any dialogue
or any fantasy. It's just pure image.

Speaker 4 (21:31):
Yeah. Well, and then it's interesting how the author he
embeds himself right in these discord communities. I think one
of them is the goon Verse discord with fifty thousand members.
And then there's all these stream rooms in the discord
server where people stream themselves like watching porn, jerking off
like it's super Oh yeah, and actually I did want

(21:54):
to just also add the rituals, right that kind of
like the the some examples of the rituals that they have,
so they have this term feeding where they send each
other curated porn or goon fuel, right, and then they
have like competitive feeding that they call wank battling where
users rate each other's like porn selections. And then there's

(22:17):
like goon caps, which is like memes. Pornographic means memes
like traded commodified. It's like on these communities.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
This is the symbolic exchange aspect of it too, like
the ritual element, but also there's no other that you're
copulating with, so the other just becomes your bro that
knows your tastes and curates the perfect porn exactly as
you want it. They kind of replaced the algorithm.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
It's like, this is the real that we were all
looking for.

Speaker 4 (22:50):
And then there was a real striking, a real striking
point when he's talking to to like one of the
community members. I think their name was a Spish akt
and uh and it was it was. It was very
striking because he did well, he did surveys and then
he also interviewed a bunch of them, as I said before,
but what ak says was really striking to me because

(23:13):
he's like, what about like going out and meeting a woman,
like having real sex, and he has a whole bunch
of reasons for why he doesn't want to do that.
He's like, well, he's afraid of STDs, he's you know,
afraid of having children and all these other things. But
then it turns out, and this is quoting from the article,

(23:33):
it turns out what most frightened spish act about sex
is the impossibility of ever knowing what's really going on
in your partners or anyone else's head if she's bored
by what sish Ak's doing, too uh but too polite
to tell him. Right, So that to me stood out
as like a real moment of like evidence of like

(23:53):
obsessional neuroses, right, because that like in a way, trying
to annihilate the other and just be like on your own,
like to emphasize your own subjectivity and like and and
basically creating the conditions where like your desire can never
be but it doesn't quite fit either, like with obsessional neurosis,

(24:15):
which we can talk about more a bit later. But
I just wanted to mention because that stood out to me.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
No, because according to think, the female slash hysteric positions
is there imagining she's somebody else while you're having sex,
so right to feel threatened, I guess. But the subsession
of the gooners with with e girls too, which is
defined here as a nebulous category that goon World primarily

(24:43):
refers primarily to women who dabble in gamer girl aesthetics,
neon hair, cat earspandex Spider Man costumes, and who more
often than not sell adult content on only fans, and
then goes on to point out the sheer ocean of
material that people these people have to wait around in,

(25:06):
which is like in two thousand and five, the professional
porn industry released about thirteen thousand films over the year.
Over the year last year, there were four point six
million registered OnlyFans creators four point six million creators each.

(25:26):
I don't know. I don't know how often they make
videos A few times a week, I guess four point
six million times many videos a week and live streams
and all kinds of content. There's too much, there's too
much to masterate to each seth. I guess. Porn music
videos just like a like, are like mashups, postmodern remix

(25:48):
styles of the too much porn, coming to the same
realization that like postmodern theorists came to fifty years ago
about literature, but pornography instead. Oh my god, all.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Right, this is the question that Victor asked earlier, but
we can slide into it. I should be careful of
my verbs here.

Speaker 4 (26:09):
My verb choice.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
Goers gooners are often called perverts, but as we are
self self described experts on perversion. Now, do you guys
think that they are.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
A couple of weeks of reading, do you think that?

Speaker 3 (26:27):
Do you think they're perverts? Well? Not, like, just so
the listeners know this is not in a colloquial sense,
but psychoanalytically.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
Well, let's let's let's let's let's technically hell no, let's review. Like,
so if we remember, I think perversion, it's like relation
to the law. So it identifies as kind of the exception. Right. So,
and they staged themselves as the instrument of like of
fulfilling other people's desires, and they kind of stage situations

(27:00):
of law. So in order to discover it, Yeah, in
order to discover it, exactly, in order to discover it.
So they stage situations in order to try to discover it.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
They want to actually be the cause of pleasure.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
That's the thing. They want to be the cause, so
they create acts like perverse acts I guess.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Not in fantasy but actual and.

Speaker 4 (27:19):
Actually and they want to try to be the one
who said it satisfies the other's enjoyment. So that kind
of doesn't fit, right, And then.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
The edging thing just doesn't work at all. That's pure,
that's pure neurotic.

Speaker 4 (27:31):
It's kind of enacted through transgression, but it's also like ritualized,
so it's like I serve the other's enjoyment. I think
against that's like, I guess the ritualistic aspect sort of fits,
but I think ultimately the relationship to desire seems to
not fit.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
And perversion I thought was also or maybe just specifically fetishism,
which I think is a category within perversion. And I
don't know, but it's specifically non genital, right like you know,
the it's it's a non genital object as well, like
the foot fetish right, like a pervert a perfect like

(28:11):
a neurotic is the genital thing. I don't, I don't know,
does this article mention? I mean, it's it's it's pornography,
it's sex. It must be genital stuff.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Except for one thing. So and I think you guys
are I think you're right that psycho analytically, at least
at the beginning stages of this, it's not a perverse structure.
It's like a hyper extremist, neurotic, obsessive.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, it's very polarized with the female.

Speaker 4 (28:43):
Not definitely, there's no not even a tiniest little wisp
of hysteric here.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
It's like annihilation of the other, except there's one there's
one place where I think, I don't know if you
can't you can't change structures fundamentally, but the the can
have perversions, So there's it eventually becomes a sort of stage.
But they're not they're not doing it in public technically,

(29:10):
so it's not like getting off on the other knowing. However,
the author does talk about at least one of them,
and maybe multiples of them, being so eager and ready
to answer his survey questions, like willing to disclose their
their transgressions to just whoever asks. So to me, that

(29:31):
reads like it could be some sort of humiliation kink
that they're so excited to like expose the well, the
depravity of their of their perversions, not not their structure,
but their perverted acts to the other.

Speaker 4 (29:48):
Well, this is where there's been a kind of strange
reversal in the modern age in the sense that like
now you feel guilt for not enjoying enough. So it's
like the trends like in a way, like the transgression
becomes to not enjoy as opposed to like enjoying too much.
And that's the thing that that Jijik always points out

(30:09):
right that that it's like that like that you enjoy
and like in this community, I would say that's kind
of uh to the extreme in a sense. So it's
still sort of following the same pattern, but but the
but now like the norm the sort of the law
is to enjoy kind of in a strange sense. So
that's why like all of it is sort of out

(30:31):
out in the opened.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Even even with that funeral they had for that Malone guy,
like he was clearly I don't think he was. He
wasn't a gooner, Yeah, not even a gooner like in
what could be all.

Speaker 4 (30:46):
I'd probably tell the audience what that what we're talking
about though, because that's just like an anecdote right at
the beginning of the article about Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
The hook for the article is it's the way in
it's the hook they bring up this guy named not
a Malone who was out at that Bikini Beans we
were talking about, which is like the Starbucks Hooters, and
he was like in the drive through masturbating and a
Dodge challenger had no like pants on, and the staff

(31:16):
members started.

Speaker 4 (31:18):
To know it wasn't his first time doing it.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, okay, so that they knew him.

Speaker 4 (31:24):
And she had her camera because she was probably saw
him and was like, oh, there's that guy again coming
in like dick out.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Well, you know, they filmed him and posted it on
social media anyway, and it's actually a pretty sad story.
A guy had like a wife and kids. He went
off and like commit committed suicide. I'm assuming it was
because of having exposed put online. He's exposed exposed himself
and then was exposed online and then this. But this,

(31:52):
and it's pretty sad. It brings up a lot of
questions on its own. But this event was completely co
opted by the gooner. The goon squad a subculture, and
it was like, you know, labeled a goonicide and they
all went out to this shop where this guy was

(32:14):
sexually harassing the staff. Slash was shamed into suicide and
had not a funeral, but a gooneral for this guy.
That's why we were saying it has martyrs appropriated, martyrs
who seem to have nothing to do with their movement.
But hey, and religion goes and pilgrimage, Yeah, pilgrimage out

(32:37):
to the funeral site where they were sort of having
a ritualistic ceremonial goodbye to one of their honorary non members, which.

Speaker 4 (32:49):
Is which reminded me of some of the pattern of
in cells too, where they sort of in cells also
do that. Well, they did that specifically with school shoot
with shooters, right who they adopt as their own. Weather
or not, there's explicit enemy a sorry, explicit evidence or
not that the shooter was an in cell that in
cell community tended to sort of if it's sort of

(33:09):
fit a certain pattern, they'd be like, oh, it's another
Elliott Roger, it's another one of us. And I was
also curious in the article, I mean, he does bring
up sort of in cell viole cell like voluntary celibates,
and actually that's something we haven't mentioned too. There's a
fascinating part where he says that some of the people
in the community describe themselves as porno sexuals, meaning that

(33:32):
like they identify it as a sexual orientation where they
feel like they actually only want like porn is their
sexual orientation. It's not like people, it's just porn itself.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
So there you go. That would be like an object done.
That would be like an object choice.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Except it's a sex is the object sex videos. But
he also said he also said that it wasn't that
not that they're not all in cells, like some of
them were sexually active on the side, they're just like
primarily poor and cells.

Speaker 4 (34:05):
Which well, and then that was that was actually a
really interesting point when he brings up the fact that
the people who tended to have a side like real
sexual real sexual life on the side, were a bit older,
so they were they were the ones who ended up
actually going to college.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
They're they're a bit out of touch.

Speaker 4 (34:22):
Or or maybe it was reversed, I forget. No, it
was the older ones who I think had so the
whereas like the ones who are.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
The vestiges of a normal life.

Speaker 4 (34:31):
They spent they spent all their time in like in
their like upper adolescents in in lockdown.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
I mean, pornosexual does sound like a perversion. I'm not
gonna lie that certainly a non genital sexual object choice,
but it's still it is genital in itself despite what
it portrays. It is a non human thing.

Speaker 4 (34:56):
Well, I want to go but I want to go
back to that quote I meant where that he confesses
that his greatest fear is not understanding like what the
other thinks, right, And I think that is such a
such a classic sign of an of an extreme obsessional neuroses,
because you know, I think part of the a core

(35:17):
fear in the obsessional neurotic is the other's desire, right,
it's it's it's and so like you, they can't bear
sort of the opacity of another, the fact that you
you won't know everything about the other. You can't. So
that's why you keep trying to annihilate the other in
a sense, because you because the fact that they might
have other desires could like risks your sort of risks

(35:43):
your own existence in a way. So like you're constantly
trying to so this fear, this core fear of the
other's desire, and in a way, like the pornosexual pretty
much just totally totally side steps, avoids, completely avoid It's
that dynamic of the other's desire, right because they you know, you,

(36:05):
it threatens the idea, Like the idea that the other
is at least to some extent unknowable is extremely threatening
to the obsessional neurotic.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
Right.

Speaker 4 (36:14):
The obsessional neurotic wants to get everything under his thumb
kind of understand everything. I've got everything figured out, And
the fact that there's an unknowable desire in the other
is extremely threatening to the obsessional desire. They want to
control everything, They want to understand everything and and and
secure their own subjectivity. So so I think, like, I

(36:36):
think it's very obsessional.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
Yeah, it's hype hyper hyper obsessional to be able to
manage everything on all of your screens. It's like all
these images of people having sex are in your prison
and you can just have exactly, you can have them
as easily accessible drive through objects.

Speaker 4 (36:53):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
But however, there's that's only stage one, is this hyper
obsessional turning, like all getting off on an object and
then all your objects, you're all your sex toys in
your little arsenal with you. Because the goon state, the
goon state is stage two, which is which is not
the death of the other, it's the death of desire.

(37:17):
So the death of the self. It's like a it's
a death drive. And this is this is the article's
quotation for this point, which I think he made brilliantly.
Congrats again, Daniel. He says, if there's any coherent message
to the sprawling folk art practices of goon world, it
is this kill yourself, not literally, not literally, but spiritually.

(37:39):
Where mainstream porn invites the straight male viewer to imagine
himself as the man on screen. That's not true, lacanianly,
but you know what it means. Gooner porn constantly reminds
viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to
porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them.
Quote ruin your mind, quote go deeper, quote give up

(38:02):
on life. These are voiceovers that apparently run during the
during the PMVS, which is like this humiliation of stuff.
Kill yourself. So there's the kill yourself thing to arrive
at Nirvana. It's it begins as hyper desire and then
it ends with the desire to kill desire, but on

(38:26):
your own terms. Yeah without the other, yeah.

Speaker 4 (38:30):
Without the other. Right. So it's like, I so like,
what's unbearable? I think is for your subjectivity to be
compromised by another. And remember, by the way, the fundamental
question and obsessional neuroses is am I alive or am
I dead? Right, That's the fundamental question of the obsessional
So and the other's desire threatens kind of the the

(38:55):
from my understanding, right, So, I think in some ways
there is like, you know, the goonerism taken to its
most extreme is almost is almost like a controlled well,
it is a controlled death drive that I think is
still in relation to that obsessional sort of question where

(39:15):
where it's like, well, I'm just gonna push, I'm gonna
it's like a nihilistic turn almost, and there is actually
a weird nihilistic subtext to all of this, all of
this like and there's all this encouragement to go farther
and farther. Yeah, so I think it still fits with obsession.

Speaker 2 (39:30):
Yeah, it's kind of like a reversal of the in
cell's sort of like genuine git that I guess if
the in cell has a genuine like anger at not
being slept with. Yeah, like to the point where there's
like acts of extreme violence that go along with it.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
This, this is the complete reversal of that. It's like
a dialectical reversal, if I can use that word, you know,
complete self denial, complete self effacement. Yeah, the other side
of the equation now, not this like perverse affirmation of
life and like murdering other people, but like, you know,

(40:13):
some some weird intimacy with strangers.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Through some kind of self denial, some kind of self
effacement something like that. Anyway, and the fluidity of it
with you just saying like you know, what we would
classify as gay porn just pops up there, and the
obsessional neurotic rejects the hysterics question, like you know, am

(40:39):
I a man or am I a woman? Like what
is my gender position? The neurotic denies that question or
rejects it and sometimes regards themselves as like beyond it,
neither man nor woman or both.

Speaker 4 (40:52):
It's kind of weird how this gooton progression goes, because
it's like the beginning of it, it's almost like this
intense obsessional desire. But then it like it reaches this
tipping point the further you go, where it almost turns
into like an automation of drive, like oh nice, yeah,

(41:20):
Like so I don't know, what do you what do
you think about that?

Speaker 3 (41:22):
No, you just predict. I can't believe you said that,
because you just predicted everything I had written from the
Boudriard side of this. Okay, cool, because when we say
this is like extremest extremeist neurotic, at a certain point,
I was wondering, okay, like in the con is it
possible to go backwards? Is it possible to actually destroy

(41:43):
the other? Because they're almost on the verge of that, right,
And technically, of course it's not possible there, but it
seems like something more is going on here than just
extreme obsessional. Yeah, and later later Baudriard has this obsession
with evil, and evil is the reversibility of subject and object.

(42:04):
So most most nineties theorists say, oh, there's no real
division between subject and object. We've just taken this too
seriously because we've been anthropocentric and blah blah blah blah.
Bruno LeTour exactly Bodyards justin says instead, you know what,
I just want to keep the two categories subject and object,

(42:25):
but just demonstrate that the object is winning. We've kept
We've kept the subject in its crown position for a
couple hundred years. Now let's just reverse it. But we
see that here. I think if you take pornography as
a technical image and kind of what you just said,
this it becomes automated. It's like there's no one there

(42:46):
doing the masturbating and instead of the instead of the
subject being deviant, there's no subjectivity left because this becomes
an automated process. This becomes the object taking over and
in a conceptual sense as well as just the literal
object of twenty twenty screens blasting pornography at the same time.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
But because because that is that, because objects are seductive,
like evil is seduction.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
That's his that's his main term in his uh in
his nineties works, and I think that is like this,
the seduction to quote unquote kill yourself, not literally, the
seduction of ego death through an object, as opposed to
the previous forms of sorry ego death in religion, which

(43:38):
were supposed to be contemplative. You contemplate God, you contemplate
the universe, you contemplate time, and then you have ego
death and you can ascend to a higher sphere. This
is completely instrumentalizing the object of your computer and your
phone and your tablet and pornography and annihilating yourself that way,

(44:00):
giving all of your agency over to the object. So
it's a it's a reversal that was predicted in nineteen
ninety I think was when Baudriard wrote Transparency of Evil.
But that that, to me explains what's happening here a
little bit better than just extreme obsessional.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Yeah, if any image stuck with me, it was one
of the sort of black hole where it's the object
becoming this seductive force that sucks everything in, which is
very different from la CON's take on an object, which
is object. Ah. Yeah, very very different kind of thing there. That. Yeah,

(44:44):
like Boudriards maybe fits a little better. That's this situation.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
Yeah, that speaks to like the acceleration and what Victor
just brought up spontaneously before is the disappearance of anything Human.
Videos are hyper produced. They're almost unwatchable. They're like, you know,
it's like when we turn on TikTok. I, Yeah, TikTok's
it's over stimulating, it's unbearable.

Speaker 4 (45:11):
Well I don't have it, but yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
Don't have it either, but I mean it exists. I
have a lot.

Speaker 4 (45:18):
I seen it, but I refuse to download the app.

Speaker 3 (45:22):
Maybe we could could we relate this back to Jewey
songs and.

Speaker 4 (45:27):
Well, I was thinking about non.

Speaker 3 (45:28):
Differentiation of the they're taking pleasure in it, but it's
at the same time it collapses, it dissolves, and then
maybe this is like the end point is basically to
become an object, just the object.

Speaker 4 (45:42):
That's That's exactly what I think. I kind of feel
like it's almost like the obsessionals fantasy of like controlling
everything kind of against the reel of the other's desire
or the reel of Jewey songs. And it's like it's
almost like what begins as trying to defend against the
other's desire sort of ends up being like a fusion

(46:06):
or something where like the subject almost becomes the object
it's trying to master, It becomes part of it it
because like it collapses into a kind of uh yeah,
like collapses into the act, Like the act in like
trying to be like a subject who's mastering everything almost

(46:26):
just dissolves collapses into it and just like becomes an
automated juissance object itself or something.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
It's an Ara Boro's dildo where it's just fucking itself forever.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, exactly, like this this stuff is is heavily gender coded.
It seems too right, like obviously young post pubescent males
mostly and and the only, yeah only, and the idea
that Lacan's saying, you know, there's no sexual relation. This

(47:03):
the sexual rapport, the lack of the sexual report in
the podexual idea that pornography in general is deeply connected
to this sexual non rapport. This, this no relation between
the sex's idea of Leacan's and I think the the

(47:23):
obsessional neurosis there controlling that and eliminating the other. This
the anxiety that the the other might reappear, the other
might have some control is is intolerable? Yeah, which is
with that that extreme edging, that extreme masturbatory combined with

(47:48):
I mean it's the.

Speaker 4 (47:49):
The scrolling, the scenes, the machines, all of it. It
just becomes like one big over stimulated fusion of like
a of like desire into object into like just part
of a process where where like the like the subjective
feeling of trying to master the object and master bait
I guess just becomes like totally disappears into like object only. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
This is expressed by the jouissance of It is expressed
by the best name in here. There's some good names
in here, like a goon cultist, but by far the
best named character is white Boy Jacker. A Jacker. Sorry,
Jacker was an interesting case. Wh Jacker was an interesting case,

(48:42):
one of goon World's truly lost souls. He'd spent part
of our call. He'd spent part of our call trying
to explain the appeal of damaging your penis so badly, Jeesus,
you can permanently prevent getting an erection, but not so
badly to prevent masturbating for hours on end. This is

(49:09):
white Boy Jacker is truly the the fanged Numena in
terms of Nick Land is trying to like overturn Kant
Kant and Kant said masturbation was like an ethical sin
because because you're using yourself as an object, and of
course you can only treat subjects as ends, not as means.

(49:31):
So White Boy Jacker trying to break his dick Jesus,
intentionally causing so much pain on yourself so that you
can you can keep participating in the in the act. Oh,
white boy Jacker, oh wow, is the Nick of goon World.

Speaker 4 (49:50):
I imagine that he spent a lot of the call
trying to convince this writer from Harpers that this was
a good idea. This is level shit. This is like it's.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
Gonna convert him and get a new gooner into the mix.

Speaker 4 (50:05):
This is insane stuff.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
How are you damaging your penis? Is it like just
by jacking or just by sticking it out things that
it shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Be It can't imagine, or you're just you're just whacking
it like I don't know, the pain Olympics, remember that
sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
Pain is pleasure?

Speaker 4 (50:26):
Oh my god, it's like a.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Test of your ability to keep looking. But that that's
something else that's taken edging to a new level. You know,
you're not just holding back from the edge, you're finding
you're damaging your body.

Speaker 4 (50:43):
This goon state though, right, I think it's maybe worth
mentioning that when the writer did his survey, I think
he found that most people said that they'd maybe only
ever reached the goon state once, if at all. Right,
I think like it's like a rare state that they
talk about as like a fleeting, a fleeting thing.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
Same with religion. I keep coming back to this in
my own head. This is like precisely the Catholic or
maybe not actual Catholics, but you know, the the Orthodox
Catholic view of sexuality, that it's completely instrumentalized, that it's
meant to be something mechanical that you embrace only as

(51:29):
a matter of necessity. Well, this is profoundly anti sexual
all all that I know.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Maybe that that damaging your penis thing is is I mean,
the point, the point of it is to become a
legend in your community. So one point when we read Fink,
he talks about the obsess of living for posterity, and
and in that in that sense, all juy songs is

(51:57):
transferred to the other. Which if you're a writer, that's
that's what you're doing. You're you're living for the future readers.
You're not. You're not you're not retaining any of it
for yourself. But but this, but also I guess becoming
like a legend in the gooner community is also another
way of of you know, transferring all your jewey songs away.

(52:21):
It say, just the the obsessive lives posthumously sacrificing everything,
all satisfaction in the here and now for the sake
of his name, having his name live on the name
being the name of the father. The name passed down
from the father is in some sense the other who
passes on the law and whose jewey sonce is ensured

(52:43):
by the obsessive accumulation of publications, titles, money, property, awards,
and so on. I mean, what what better. I don't
know how many how much money or property that guy's
getting out of this, but that what that online community
is a way of living for posterity.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
He's literally castrating himself in order to acquire the imaginary
fallace back. You're not supposed to do it literally. That's
the whole thing is you symbolically castrate yourself. But he
did it literally for the symbolic value.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Of it, like immortal fame, like a modern day Achilles.

Speaker 3 (53:19):
I did want to connect back to the end of
this article, where.

Speaker 4 (53:23):
Oh yeah, the end is really interesting.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
But he says that like gooning is not an exception
of the Internet at large, these days, gooning is just
the pure version of the Internet at large. So he says,
nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a
whole from the rest of us. Think about it, What
are the gooners actually doing wasting hours each day? Consuming

(53:47):
short form video content, chasing intensities of sensations across platforms,
parasocially fixating on micro celebrities who want their money, broadcasting
their love for these micro celebrities in public forums, conducting
bizarre self experiments because someone on the internet told them to.
In general, am during connective other directed pleasures for the

(54:08):
comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of that
sound familiar? Do you know, maybe 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.

Speaker 4 (54:23):
Yeah, So that that.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
That reinforced my theory of the revenge of the object.
The revenge of the object, they've just accepted it, and
the revenge of the object over human sovereignty is something
that's been coming on us for a while. But that
kind of that kind of speaks to it.

Speaker 4 (54:40):
I also thought the last bit, like even the even
more close to the end he's talking about. He says,
peering into the into goon world's darkest corners has convinced
me that what we are dealing with here may well
be a structural flaw of network communication itself. Is there
a timeline or regulatory environment and which the Internet does

(55:00):
not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicidal
cults or suicide cults. Rather, I find it hard to imagine.
In the case of Gooner's one can hope and in
more cheerful moments, I do think it's possible that sustained
over exposure to porn will dampen the medium's effectiveness as
a numbing agent. That at a certain point the goomer

(55:22):
will open his eyes, find himself in a room filled
with lube but void of love, and decide that the
boredom of staying in the room outweighs the fear of
whatever lies beyond. So that's like the very end of
the article. And it also like it again, I've talked
about this on the podcast before, but I remember, you know,
I always like to dunk on heart and agree and

(55:43):
how in you know, an empire. They were like, Oh,
the Internet's going to be like this new you know,
this this new emancipatory force right for like for for
exercising the best capacities of human of human nature and
human creativity. And I think I mean here he calls
it a structural flaw of network communication. But I feel
like it's more like network communication revealed the structural flaw

(56:05):
of human subjectivity.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
I think, what is the structural flaw that we don't
we don't actually desire our subjective Like.

Speaker 4 (56:13):
The mechanical infrastructure of like our desire economy is just
easily exploited.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
This creation of these suicide cults.

Speaker 4 (56:23):
And we're going to prefer that exploitation over like thoughtful
democratic you know, most of us are going to prefer
being exploited to being like thoughtful emancipatory democratic agents. Most
of us are going to prefer the exploitation. That's that's
the flaw.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
And remember this is only one of the most extreme
of the epidemics that were going around. I think was
it during or after COVID, Remember when everyone was suddenly
like coming down with turets. The exposure to people having
tics like that, that is part of that structural flaw
communication too. It's like, you know, it's like a kind

(57:03):
of virtual influenza.

Speaker 4 (57:06):
I don't know, but I think it's true that it's
not just the gooner community, right, It's I mean, the
whole Internet is structured in a similar function, right, It functions.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
Similarly, I think that though, that the the liberation that
they're talking about, like the liberation happened, the liberation of
any desire to desire anything, Yeah, happened.

Speaker 4 (57:30):
That happened.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
It's just they thought it would have like a neurotic
end rather than a an orgiastic, ecstatic and.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Well from I don't know, from from a psychoanalytics.

Speaker 4 (57:43):
Where are you talking about heart and egre there?

Speaker 3 (57:45):
Yeah, I mean the liberation happened.

Speaker 4 (57:47):
The oh yeah, the liberation happened, but it just wasn't
political liberation. It was desire liberation.

Speaker 3 (57:52):
Well, I think it's the liberation of the subject to
destroy itself permanently.

Speaker 4 (57:57):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (57:58):
Now.

Speaker 4 (57:58):
They thought it would be liberation liberation to fight capitalism
and take it over because the capitalist wouldn't be able
to control our communication only. I mean, that's totally not happened.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
I mean, I know, I just read about I read
out the thing about the father's name being passed down.
But are there any fathers on the internet? I mean
from a psychoanalytic perspective, maybe you'd have to take into account.

Speaker 4 (58:23):
Jordan Peterson, I guess, so what.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
Would he have to say about all this? Could he
stop it, could he lay down the law I think
there is I don't know, or maybe there's a lack
of fathers for these people. I mean, you have to
consider this is these are people post pupezant young men
who are probably in the process of were having resolved

(58:51):
the oedipal complex, and there's sexual differentiation happening, and suddenly
these sorts of things. I mean, this is a certain
age group and a certain gender that is seriously exposed
to these dangers of the structural flaw of communication is
definitely has because the older people do have some vestiges

(59:12):
of normal relationships, the younger people are extremely vulnerable to
this sort of stuff, to conspiracy theories, to gooning, edging.

Speaker 4 (59:25):
You're making me think though about the father function that
because I sent you guys a clip maybe like half
an hour before, because very controversial in both conservative circles
and other like that. Tucker Carlson had Nick Flentes on
his podcast like yesterday, the day before or something, and
they talked about porn on it for like I don't know,
maybe like eight minutes or something like near the end,

(59:47):
and I mean he didn't talk explicitly about gooning, but
sort of did like sort of described it without describing it.
But it also made me think that when you were
talking about like where's the father online, then in a way,
like it feels like conservatives are the only ones who
are trying to be the father online, and like that
makes like, I don't know, this is just like an
off the cuff thought, but it's making me wonder, like what,

(01:00:08):
Like it's like people like Tucker Carlson, like you know,
Jordan Peterson, are like trying to like lay down some
sort of law and like no one else's It's like
there's like a gap there.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
We grew up at the best time we had. We
had to try for our porn, so it instilled in
us a level of suppression or repression that we still
carry with us. We still have our dads in our heads.

Speaker 4 (01:00:33):
Yeah exactly. I mean it does seem like it does
seem like we used the internet at the beginning to
like talk to our friends that we were hanging out
with in real life, and then yeah, things became more online.
But then we started using Instagram, as he points out
in the in the article, to like raise awareness about racism,
and then uh, and yeah, like we came of age.

(01:00:55):
I guess we were. Most of us were probably well
into our twenties or maybe late teens. Actually, I'm trying
to think when, like you know, porn hubstyle porn started
showing up, I guess. But like at that point, we
had already, like you said, pills, had to at least
do some kind of struggling to see that nude magazine
that your friend had, that your friend stole from his

(01:01:17):
dad's dash or something like that. Right that, we still
had to go through that, and I think there is
something hiding in the treehouse. Yeah, there is something significant
about that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
Yeah, there was that structure. There was there was Yeah,
the route wasn't so direct and it wasn't just a
mailstrom that sucks.

Speaker 4 (01:01:37):
Like we experienced the contrast. It's like we got to
enjoy the Internet as being an alternative to that older
way where we're like, oh wow, like now we can
do this thing that we had to struggle with. But
it'd be so weird and different to grow up where
all you know is that infinite availability of everything.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
We're speaking to the breakdown, and I think this is
applicable the breakdown not just of availability of any type
of image that you want to bring it, to bring
it back to the breakdown of the other, I don't.
It's not actually even the breakdown of the other. It's
just that the other belongs to now whatever bubble you

(01:02:17):
are in, as opposed to whichever bubble the next person is.
And you have like micro communities like this where you
can have what the article calls niche suicide cults, either
figuratively and god forbid literally. But when you have this
sort of breakdown that the networked communication is able to
make or able to undertake this just because you can

(01:02:41):
communicate with people anywhere who simply happen to have the
same lineup of quirks that you do. And then there's
like a feedback loop right where desire gets steered. But
bode Yard speaks of this in terms of he says
the term transsexual, but transsexual is not the not the identity,

(01:03:03):
but rather the culture is in a state of transsexuality,
where sexuality has disappeared. So I want I wanted to
read this and see if it echoes the liberation of
all After deliberation of all desires, we have moved into
the transsexual the transparency of all sex with signs and
images erasing all its secrets and ambiguity, because right in psychoanalysis,

(01:03:28):
that's the power of sexuality, is the secrecy transgression. This
is what makes it desirable, and that that's over right
transsexual in the sense that it has nothing to do
with the illusion of desire, only with the hyper reality
of the images of desire. In reality, there is no

(01:03:48):
longer any pornography since it is everywhere. The essence of
pornography permeates all vision. So this is it wasn't the
best ending to the last paragraph say oh yeah, by
the way, all the Internet is just like gooners, But
I do agree with the sentiment coinciding with what Baudriard

(01:04:09):
just said there that the object the image as object
and turning the image into a completely functional instrumental end
that doesn't it barely even needs humans to function, like
the way we see propaganda today. The propagandass have zero

(01:04:31):
concern of what they say, zero concern of the effects
of what they say. You could maybe rope AI into this,
just like completely automated automated image production so that people
can glance at it and like it and move on.
So it's the instrumentalizing, the taking the humans out of
the equation aspect of all this. I think that the

(01:04:54):
gooners do do shed some light on the destruction of
the subject in a conceptual way. Anyway, that's my conclusion.

Speaker 4 (01:05:03):
That's I mean, I think that there's something very compelling
about that. You know, to bring it back to psychoanalysis
a little bit, I guess I do think because you
said something also about the elimination of all transgression that
like you don't have it anymore, and I really do
keep returning to that Jijak observation about that like that

(01:05:24):
that it's that the reversal of what what counts as transgression.
Because again, obviously me being a political theorist and thinking
about politics and polarization a lot of the time and
even my research now, it does make me wonder if
that reversal accounts for like a lot of Zoomers making

(01:05:49):
a turn towards conservatism, making a turn towards you know,
traditional values. Yeah, because because in a way like that's
that's become transgressive, right, like in a in a weird
way that like it or you know, I'm not even
talking about Nazism, but I'm even talking about the turn
away from like again, I don't know I need to
find stats to you know, maybe what I'm saying is bullshit,

(01:06:11):
but it just does feel like younger men are are
more critical of sexual liberation for example, right, like even
and and that like that. It's like and they talk
about i mean, on these red Pill podcasts and shit,
they talk about like how damaging porn is, right, all
these things they talk about it. And it's like in
a way that the and the transgressive thing is actually

(01:06:33):
to be like against those things, right, to be the
transgressive thing is to like go against this kind of
like liberal permissibility of everything, permissibility of all desires.

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:06:46):
And it just it's it's like it makes it just
makes me wonder like if that's also some kind of
like a background effect. Yeah, I think I.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Think Pills is on the right path with that no
more secrets kind of thing, isn't that? Isn't that Beau
Triard the obscenity, Right.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
That's what the transparency means. In the transparency of evil,
there's no there's no secrets, so they have to be invented, right,
so they invent the goon state is the newest secret.
Half of them don't even know if it exists. Yeah, right, right,
they invent a secret to build a cult around.

Speaker 4 (01:07:29):
Yeah, maybe maybe it's never happened.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Pornography is obscene in itself, right because in that sense,
because there's nothing is held back, there's no visible I
was talking about soft core porn, right, where some is
purposefully held back, like or even like bikinis like that,
like that bikini cafe place the guy was masturbating at, right,
there's like things are held back, things are held in secret.

(01:07:54):
With pornography, with the the ecstasy of communication, right, like
everything is out in the open and visible. That's the
the obscenity. There's no there's no spectacle, there's no illusion.
It's just everything is transparent, exposed, everything is converted into information.

(01:08:17):
There's no more narrative, there's no more drama, none of
that stuff. It's all just that. I mean that that
was in a way. That's that that's that structural flaw.
I mean that's not a flaw in communication. That's that
is that is built into it, that is baked into

(01:08:38):
the information communication age, where things like pornography denying any
kind of hiddenness of sexuality the body. And it's the
same with conspiracy theory, right, the demands that there be
no secrets. What is what is? Conspiracy theory is biggest
demand no secrets? Right, everything out in the open, everything visible, nothing,

(01:09:04):
nothing will escape the penetrating view of the internet sleuths.
Who will who will get all the government's secrets out
in the open one way or another? Right, same, same
sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
I mean, conspiracy theory. We're touching on something cool here,
which is too bad because we should be ending. But
the conspiracy theories also invent secrets or turn you know,
banal events into moments of insane secrecy when someone's holding
something back. So yeah, I think I think you drew

(01:09:38):
the connection right, Eric, that in the ecstasy of communication,
secrets have to be invented. It's like Voltaire saying if
God were, if God didn't exist, we'd have to invent
him now. Because everything is compelled to be transparent by
the function of network media, we also have to invent
secrets that can't be known, and you have a return

(01:10:00):
to occultism. You have to turn in too, like the
beliefs of medieval peasants, because everything can be known, so
we invent things that can't be known, like the nirvana
state of masturbating for eight hours in a day, or
conspiracy theories like the French President's wife is a man.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
And that's what's so frustrating about psychoanalysis is because we're
dealing with the unconscious, which is irreducible. There's no there
is no like. You can't know it. You can't know
the unconscious.

Speaker 3 (01:10:46):
Well, it is an open question where where will we
get our juis ons from here on out? Well, guys,
I think that's pretty good, very good. Ruin your mind
is the mantra we didn't.

Speaker 4 (01:11:01):
We didn't mention the slightly more positive goon guy who like,
who likes, who excommunicates people, Well, he doesn't. He just
says like whenever people talk about that like crazy like
goon state of going forever, he's just like, man, like
you need to get some help, you need to Like
he's like, this is just about like jerking off together

(01:11:21):
and like having a good time. It's not it's not
about like anything. He's just like, man, you're He's like,
you're missing the point, Like this is just about a
bunch of bros jacking it, having a good time, and
don't take it so seriously.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
The pro humanist gooner.

Speaker 4 (01:11:35):
Oh my god, the pro humanist schooner who's in there.

Speaker 2 (01:11:41):
Just loving it but totally has a moral compass.

Speaker 4 (01:11:44):
Yeah, he has more of a and he's all about
like like consent and like you know all this, like
you know, good stuff, just morally pure, morally pure gooning.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
Just a big bro.

Speaker 4 (01:11:59):
He's a he's so he's a Jedi brother against the Sithoner.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
All the little goons.

Speaker 3 (01:12:05):
If this is the future, uh, you know, we gotta pray.

Speaker 4 (01:12:11):
Pray for all of all of us who have chosen
to have children in this horrible, horrible world.

Speaker 3 (01:12:17):
I think, I mean, I'll think I'm going to end this.
Thank you for listening everyone, Thank you guys. I'm gonna
end this on the on the voiceover that's on one
of the porn music videos that's quoted in here. Nice
in the introduction to his recent video follow Me, a
woman's voice whispers ominously or perhaps sexily, that over two

(01:12:40):
hundred million people worldwide are addicted to social media. You
are one of those people. For deeper for you can't turn.

Speaker 2 (01:12:57):
End quote.

Speaker 4 (01:13:00):
Are you gonna actually find that voiceover? You should try
to find it and edit it into it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
I don't think I can watch another PMB. I was traumatized.
Thanks alright, let me find the

Speaker 4 (01:13:13):
The whole thing was quite shocking,