A recent essay by Daniel Kolitz from Harper’s gives us a bleak picture of an emergent type of tech addict: the “gooner,” a person, typically a young man, who essentially builds a life around the consumption of  pornography and other forms of mindless entertainment and stimulation. Addicts will often have multiple screens up in their rooms displaying explicit videos in an attempt to enter a “trance-like state” that lasts for hours, even days. (If you decide to read the article, note that it talks in detail about porn addiction.) Kolitz writes,

No one, besides maybe Neil Postman, could have predicted the formation of an international pornography cult. But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability. Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality.

Neil Postman is a good writer to mention in reference to technology and its social impact, but a fiction writer also managed to imaginatively diagnose America’s future technological shackles. The novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, published in 1996, features an eerily familiar predicament. A mysterious video series called the “Entertainment” is infiltrating the United States and is so addictive that people are actually dying from malnutrition. It’s entertainment so seductive that people can’t find the will to look away.

Spiritual Death by Screens

Wallace talks more overtly about his worries in the film The End of the Tour, in which he speaks to Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky about some of the inspirations behind his gargantuan novel. Basically, he says that if mindless pleasure, particularly in a future world overcome by virtual reality, becomes our main diet, we will undergo a spiritual death. We might still physically function, but our souls have withered. It’s like eating heavily refined junk food. It tastes excellent but doesn’t have any nutritional value. It doesn’t actually help you.

Wallace wasn’t speaking out against all entertainment. A fun movie or reality television is fine in moderation, but sitting in front of talking screens for hours every day? Not so healthy. I can’t imagine, were Wallace still living, what he might say about our present moment, except perhaps: “Here we are.”

Kolitz wraps up his article by stressing how this new type of addiction isn’t so far removed from the more culturally accepted forms of mindless scrolling. TikTok, YouTube shorts, AI-generated slop on X, all represent the temptation to forego one’s mental health and well-being in exchange for long exposure to digital stimulation. He writes,

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. 

For Kolitz, this isn’t a harmless, isolated habit of a few very-online fringe figures. This is a “cult” that knows no national boundaries, and it’s destroying the hearts and minds of many a welcoming victim. The term “brain rot” needs a sibling term of “soul rot.” Spiritual death, the kind Wallace warned us about, is already knocking at the door as the outside world beckons with all its hopes, fears, and people.

Just yesterday, I dined at the excellent Panda Express and opened a fortune cookie that read: “Surround yourself with good people.” It is a simple dictum, but it’s the advice the terminally online addicts need in this moment of impending cultural crisis. These are people who once had interests, goals, hopes, and dreams. They just need to be reawakened. They need real people in their lives who can help pull them out of the swamp. Too many are sinking.