Dystopian Gooner Degradation

In April, I read Daniel Kolitz's infamous gooning article. Whenever I happen 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, chaotic variety 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 popular girls from 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.

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. 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. The American empire exists in paranoid fear of its own imminent collapse; any crack in the facade leaves it vulnerable. To quell our own fears of uncertainty, we allow our privacy, our attention, and our sense of self to be invaded.

Written April 2026, edited Sept 2026.