If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them.

What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience.

As an analytic, vibes don’t connect feelings and consequence; as such, it is symbiotic with passive modes of media consumption.

neural networks behave in ways similar to vibes in capturing patterns in media and culture, online or otherwise. Both serve as perspectives that focus on associations across vast amounts of data or impressions.

These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data point meant to generate more data at the same level. They presuppose that “liking” just means more “liking” and that is as deep as our desire can be. As with vibes, these metrics carry no context or narrative; they can tell you nothing about how or why something might be desirable, only that they vaguely seem like they might be desirable because they seem similar to other things that are desirable.

It has not made me a better writer. It’s made me lazy. It’s made me love money. It’s made me see that life is more than writing, it’s lessened my chokehold on dedication. I no longer identify as an ambitious person. I identify as a person who wants to make the life that they can scrape together as comfortable as possible.

A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.

But now that I do other work, I see it all for what it is: everything is a system. The restaurant is a system, the content management is a system, the computer is a system. Everything is so much simpler than I imagined it was. I thought I was doing an easy job, but everything is an easy job when you know the system. Other professions weren’t magic. They were systems too.

The music Heidecker did dabble in was heavy on the comedy: there were spoof Bob Dylan tracks and a band called the Yellow River Boys, whose album Urinal St Station featured tracks such as Slurp it Up and Hot Piss Drinker, along with a blurb that read: “THE album for those of us who believe that the human mouth smiles the most when it is being used as a makeshift urinal. Underground leaders of the pee-freak scene, your shame no longer has to be private!”

I’m trying to be an antidote to the toxic shit on the other side of comedy.