Anyone read picrel? It was unbelievably depressing.I hate thinking that the best times are past us and that we are doomed, but it is hard to reconcile this level of consumption of empty stimuli with a future worth living in.People were leveling the same arguments against the printing press and the radio, so I can't help but feel too alarmist. What do you think?
>People were leveling the same arguments against the printing press and the radioPeople didn't carry printing presses or radios or televisions around with them for sixteen hours a day.
>>24953038Gooning is revolutionary that’s why the zog-feminazi regime fears it. Heil the incoming thousand year goonreich.
Yeah. It started out feeling very pearl-clutchy but then I started to see what he was getting at, and at the end he blatantly stated it: gooners are simply ahead of the curve. The kind of behaviors they exhibit are only exaggerations of the current zeitgeist. Gooners obsessively consume short-form video content for several hours a day, they form parasocial relationships with internet celebrities, they waste even more time bragging about their favorite celebrities on social media as well as broadcasting their niche interests for fellow obsessives. This is basically how all of Gen Z behave on the internet, and a few Millennials as well. Gooners simply wedded these behaviors to porn so they could jack off while doing it, which in the author's own words, "simply makes them more honest".
>>24953038so are you gonna post a link or what
read it? i've lived it
>>24953354https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/
>>24953038You should read 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan instead. One of my favorite novels from the 2010s
>>24953038no but every technology has a maladaptive period untill we can make full use of it and there will always be luddites
>>24953038eh, feels like nothing new: everytime new technologies bring mass production of something, people rush to that new thing and engage in mass consumption. Now's internet readily-available porn and games, at some point it was food, at some point it was oil and car culture. The pleasure of consumption, the pleasure of the senses in porn, football, cars, politics, "this activity is my identity", it looks like all the same shit to me. Then you have the retards who think they escape by going to the production side of this realm, by chasing rank, prestige, status, attention, and becoming the influencer not the doom-scroller, the creative life-affirming pornstar and not the gooner, the guru or the model not the mindless meme-spreader, but really their all part of the same mediocre ecosystem. Dependence, leveling and equality is what they promote, and a good stagnation is what they achieve, and are proud of. Society is big giant monstrosity that you shouldn't take seriously, abundance is good, it gives us time for ourselves, but what do people use their time for? They give it back to that void of society, treating named or nameless masses with importance, they engage in politics, vanity, whisperings, gossipings, mockery, develop empathy for ghostly ideas, in the all-same attempt to never look within. I'd advice to look at others and society with the same light interest you'd give to an ant colony and not get attached to any higher idea of Humanity, the sooner you recognize strangers as alien rather than immediate friend the sooner you'll be back to concerning yourself for yourself. At best you could extract some friends from it, current society is like pure nature once was, you extract from it as you can and then -- live aside, and stay there, aside .
