Pornography is considered a driver of technological development. Its usages form a cultural laboratory of digital consumer society. But what is it that people actually do with porn? If we assume that human desire is the most important resource for today’s technologies, and the desire farms of Big Porn are just a particularly explicit expression of this connection, then knowing how pornography is consumed can illuminate more than just the current state of what we call “sexuality”. This lecture essay traces the history of a relatively young form of digitized sexuality: Gooning. It describes how, over the past ten years, this form of largely male-coded self-pleasure has entered into an intimate relationship with digital media and porn. It then uses this example to hint at a larger theme in its shadow: the story of bodies that cannot help but desire the new – even when faced with the undesirable futures the technologized world they have come to depend on holds for them. Arne Vogelgesang is a performing artist. With the label internil, and under his own name, he has been combining documentary material, new media, fiction and immersive theatrical settings since 2005. Thematically, he has long focused on online forms of radical political subjectivation and their media-technological contexts, while aesthetically experimenting with digital technologies of representation. He sometimes makes video essays and gives talks & workshops on his research topics. He is currently pursuing an artistic research doctorate on virtual embodiment and desire at Vienna’s mdw. His VR performance NEW FLESH is showing at Volkstheater from April 14 to 20.