Granted, day-in-the-life TikToks or unboxing videos won’t poison your soul to precisely the same degree as gooner porn. But it’s hard not to see goonerism as just an intensification, almost a burlesque, of prevailing cultural trends. Pornosexuals are clearly not the only people out there in the process of retreating from life. It’s probably more useful to think of a company like Aylo—the owner of Pornhub and most of the other major tube sites, as well as most of the name-brand porn studios—as just another large tech-entertainment giant, like Meta, Netflix, or FanDuel. From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box, about the absurdity of your need for it. What do these companies care? They’ve won. If they have their way—and they usually do—in time we will all be gooners, of a kind.