The impression that I get is that there are three "layers" of porn involved in the gooning world (format-wise, rather than subject-matter-wise):
- images, stories, and videos—what most people up until recently have been familiar with.
- PMVs/HMVs—rapid-fire, dopamine-maxxed, quick-cut music videos splicing tons of clips together (these days with phonk and house music, mostly).
- Hypno.
You may have a ton of porn addicts hooked on the first two, but in my opinion you don't really have a "gooning" subculture without the third—any groups that call themselves "gooners", but don't involve hypno, seem to be dependent upon or derivative of those that do.
The whole ethos behind gooning seems to involve trying to transcend the human biological limitations on sexuality; they think of it as something that you can only experience—or "make contact" with—in isolated flashes due to how the body works (especially the male body), and they want to extend that experience or make it permanent. They use a bunch of techniques (and usually drugs, it seems) to do this, but it doesn't matter if the goonsesh lasts five minutes or ten days—eventually it ends.
It makes sense that re-programming the mind and personality itself would be the logical next step: instead of the "porn god/goddess" being something you can only briefly make contact with through the physiologically limited machinery of your sexual anatomy, it makes more sense to just install it as a "tulpa" (or similar method) directly into your body, either co-operating with or over-writing your personality.
A pleasant skink for an unpleasant discussion.
@Outer Space Traveller asked a really good question, which is essentially, "where does this stuff come from?"
My half-educated guess is that it's a combination of organic activity meeting top-down structures, kind of like a corporate buyout—but where exactly do the two meet? Are people organically coming up with hypno communities and linking up with shadier structures up-the-chain, or are they starting out as groups of hypno-less perverts and getting introduced to hypno from farther up?
More concisely—where did tulpa.info come from? Where are these people learning about hypnosis; are they learning about it independently, or are they in a sort of loose "tradition"?
If we want to know what kind of animal we're dealing with, it seems like we need to know the history of these psychological/occult techniques, and where perverts are getting introduced to them.
Edit: @Tari if you have any insight on this question, your input would be appreciated.