At Chrome’s scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between 6,000 and 60,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples’ default browser will mass-distribute a 4 GB binary they did not request.
— Source: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install
“Everything that made creators matter—the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools,” he wrote. “The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything.”
It seemed increasingly plausible that, faced with this onslaught, some percentage of psychically defenseless men would simply crumple, follow the platforms’ logic, and start watching porn full-time.
[…]
Over hours of focused trawling, I couldn’t identify a single rigorous study of gooning culture; cybersexologists, having quantified every twitch and spasm of the online erotic imaginary, had overlooked the gooners almost entirely.
[…]
From these [Internet tech] 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.
[…]
Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults? I find it hard to imagine.
Source: The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz (Illustration by Melcher Oosterman) https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/?lid=1szoubge35fc