The Tech Oligarchy Is Stealing Your Sexuality

Desire Digest 007: Notes on the goonicide, the tech oligarchy and the American Gooning Conspiracy

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

Over the weekend, I attended an inaugural ball for GQ. You can read about that here. It was the inauguration itself, naturally, that I think sets the true tone of what is to come in the next four years. Standing in the row in front of Trump’s own cabinet were our new leaders: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, X & Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Also in attendance was Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew. The tech oligarchy is here.

The question remains, what exactly does this billionaire class want from the rest of us? There are a few theories. One that interests me most, in predictable fashion, has to do with gooning.

The American Gooning Conspiracy

I swear I didn’t even want to bring up gooning again anytime soon, but I must. As I’ve written several times, the once-fringe practice of gooning — excessive, trance-like masturbation typically involving multiple screens of pornography — has now become a mainstream term. Goon-related content is everywhere on social media: you might even come across “gooner encouragement” videos on Instagram Reels, a platform that prohibits pornography. Viral videos of car crashes will have OnlyFans models in the comments trying to lure in new customers. I really don’t knock the hustle. I knock the apps and websites that have incentivized the ceaseless devolution of our culture into one that only values digital stimulation.

@demetriusfields @demetriusfields ♬ original sound - Demetrius fields

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Recently, this whole phenomenon has spawned what is being called the American Gooning Conspiracy. It partially evolved from a TikTok by creator and comedian Demetrius Fields, who in a three minute video yesterday explained how he believes that the apps are working together to further push men to the right by rendering them porn-addled, socially awkward and isolated. This formula, his theory goes, will make men more misogynistic; embittered by their inability to form relationships with women yet still sexually objectifying them, they will then become conservative in order to gain more control over women. “There’s a direct pipeline from gooning, to conservative podcasts, to the Fourth Reich,” he says. It all comes back to that Norm Finkelstein gooner fascism clip once again!

I think it is a slight overestimation to say that this is all the master plan of “the right” in an effort to gain more young male members, particularly because I would venture to guess that most gooners don’t even vote. The goal is not to make you a conservative, it is to make you useless. The tech oligarchy have used the broader arm of right wing politics in their project, which is part of Fields’ point. Fields — himself a leftist — further highlights that many on the left do little to encourage young men away from this pipeline, either. “There’s a lot of man-hate content on the Internet, and I’m able to understand that those are critiques of the system and not the individual but a lot of people are not smart enough to do that and they take it personally,” he says. “So now the left is alienating more young men.” The people who own the algorithms pushing gooner content are the same one’s pushing this Gender War content. It is all part of a greater effort to isolate and divide.

This is again why I’m repeatedly emphasizing the consequences of our antagonistic, severed sexual culture and gendered animosity: none of it works to serve you. None of it is designed to make you happier. It is the job of Meta, X, TikTok, Apple and Google to keep you scrolling, and the simplest way to accomplish that is by trapping you in this perfect mental corner of anger, loneliness and cheap stimuli. They’ve made it so you don’t even want sex or connection: you want a stream of thousands of gifs of women making the ahegao face.

The "Goonicide”

Meanwhile, another new goon-related term has entered the lexicon: “goonicide,” or goon-related suicide. This comes after a man was caught on video by coffee shop employees pantsless and masturbating in the drive-thru. Two days later, he committed suicide. Obviously, people who sexually violate others like this deserve to face consequences, but there is an air of sadness to the whole ordeal. Photos of him with his wife and child circulated, and it is particularly tragic that they have been publicly dragged into this.

But beyond this, I am not entirely sure how contemporary a phenomena this death represents. One upside to the constant, oppressive sense of surveillance that smart phones have brought is that perverts like this are more likely to get caught when they attempt these public acts. Pre-smart phone, guys revealing themselves in this manner was probably even more common. The fact that it happened now when the risk of getting caught is so high, is what makes the situation so baffling, however. Perhaps the threat of complete devastation was part of the appeal. Or maybe, as others have speculated, he was indeed so goon-brained that he thought a porno scene would come to life and he’d get to sleep with a barista. I think there likely was no singular, concrete motivation for why he did what he did. He probably couldn’t have explained it himself.

The fact that the term “goonicide” has come from this story perhaps yields more to dissect. Watching porn and masturbating has been synonymous with gooning for months, but this is the first I’ve seen the term associated with an act not immediately involving porn at all. Of course excessive porn consumption is a likely piece of the puzzle here, but on its face we have a man sexually assaulting employees without its involvement. That he was filmed and the footage shared online does add a digital component to this, though. It now seems to be the case the gooner represents not merely the porn addict but anyone with an Internet-mediated sexuality. And in this current era where the apps on our phones now have both intimate and political control over our lives, is that not the majority?