Hi everyone! I felt pretty weird and distracted this month, but I finished a few drawings.
"Danny's Cat Earl", 9x12", marker, colored pencil, and gel pen on cardboard, April 2026
I decided to log into my old Instagram account to ask a few tattoo artists if they wanted to trade. Even just checking my messages once or twice a day on my laptop made me feel noticably more scattered and uneasy, like I couldn't get fully immersed in anything. I thought using social media minimally for a couple weeks wouldn't affect me much, but it became so unbearable that I just sent everyone my phone number so I never have to look at it again.
"Corvette Creature", 8.5x11", pen, marker and gel pen on paper, April 2026
At the beginning of the month, I read Daniel Kolitz's
infamous gooning article. Whenever I stumble upon gooner porn, I'm fascinated by its unique visual style, so I was excited that someone else also found it worthy of serious analysis.
Most gooner porn memes I've seen fall into two distinct aesthetic categories: There's the anime-influenced, Y2K-inspired chaos that's most associated with the subculture. And then there's another that feels like a perversion of early Pinterest and Instagram aesthetics, with sans-serif and cursive fonts, muted filters, and women dressed like the popular girls I went to high school with in the early 2010s. The images feel slightly dated, but not enough to be nostalgic. Though this style looks more mundane at a glance than the overstimulating e-girl style, the borrowed corporate aesthetics make it feel more unnerving and transgressive to me.
The overlaid text ranges from standard femdom, the classic "Get worse", to more existentially threatening degradation. Things like "You will never know real connection" and "The line between fantasy and reality is fading" are common. This feels no longer like the fetishization of bodies but of technofascism itself. Instead of the fantasy of being dominated by an imagined partner, the gooner finds relief in submitting to the corporate domination of the human psyche. I'm reminded of the character in Junji Ito's The Town Without Streets who copes with the physical invasion of her home and privacy by becoming a nudist.
"Your Greatest Fears Are Invasion And Uncertainty", 9x12", ballpoint pen, marker, colored pencil, gel pen, and acrylic on paper, April 2026
I was inspired to make my own surveillance fetish pornography. I think invasion and uncertainty are the two great paradoxical fears of both the gooner and of technofascist imperialism. The men interviewed in Kolitz's article fear the vulnerability of being known and the uncertainty of never truly knowing what another person is thinking. The American empire exists in paranoid fear of its own imminent collapse; any crack in the facade leaves it vulnerable to invasion. Tech companies collaborate with governments to quantify and predict human behavior, as any deviation from prediction is a threat to both advertising revenue and imperial domination. To quell our own fears of uncertainty, we allow our privacy, our attention, and our sense of self to be invaded.
"Death's Mystery Solved!", 4x5" (if I remember right), pen, marker, gel pen, and collage piece on paper, April 2026
1. "Grey Skies" - Bassvictim
2. "LUV THAT MAN (whitney houston nxc)" - gasoiid
3. "I Like Bricks" - Ski Mask the Slump God
4. "I Need Help Immediately" - 100 gecs
5. "Fun Fact (Feat. Yung Lean)" - Bladee
6. "California World" - Lil Peep/Nedarb/Craig Xen
7. "Glock Luv" - Black Kray
8. "Attention!" - XXXTENTACION
9. "what r we posed to b" - xaviorsobased/yhapojj
10. "Chuch" - Main Attrakionz
11. "I'm Sorry, King" - Bassvictim
12. "Dead Dogs Two" - Clouddead
13. "Ay Kawkinpachasa? (capo-kullawada)" - LOS THUTHANAKA
Contact max@maxwickstrom.com with thoughts/questions/recommendations/whatever. Thanks for looking!
__________________________________________________________________
? ? ? m@☒ w!©k$7®0m 2026 ™ ® © $ $ $
www.maxwickstrom.com
/ Past Newsletter Archive
/ Unsubscribe