"The Goon Squad" is Daniel Kolitz's Harper's essay about gooning, a Gen Z subculture built around compulsive, communal, marathon porn consumption.
The essay argues that the gooners aren't freaks; they're a funhouse mirror of the rest of us, an extreme preview of what networked media is doing to everyone's capacity for real connection.
Kolitz doesn't make the case from his deskchair. Opening with the viral suicide that pushed the word into public consciousness, Kolitz joins the Discord servers where the subculture lives, surveys more than a hundred gooners, and shows up at an in-person "porn meet" in a Jersey City hotel. Then he turns everything back on you and your screen habits.
The essay wants you unsettled, because its claim is that this niche horror is a structural flaw of the internet itself.
What makes it bearable is the narrator: a wry, humane guide—repelled but curious—walking you through territory you'd never enter alone.
Some questions to consider as you read the piece:
- Subject choice: The topic itself is pretty repelling. How, in the intro, does the essay convince you to keep reading about something that you'd normally avoid?How does the essay manage to make you feel that this topic of 'gooning' must be understood?
- Reporting: Track where the essay's information comes from—scenes he witnessed, conversations he had, the survey he ran, things he read. Which moments stick with you most, and what sources do those moments draw on?
- Detail: At times the piece goes into detail that you may find excruciating or just in poor taste. Mark those passages. When you finish, go back: is that detail doing important work somewhere later in the essay, or does your verdict stand?
- Interpretation: Watch for where Kolitz stops reporting and tells you what he thinks it all means. Do those judgments strengthen the piece or weaken it? How does the author's interpretative judgements transform the piece, from a safari about some demented corner of the internet into something more?