The only way things go viral in 2025

The Lambo Of Truth Is Burning

—by Adam Bumas

The Los Angeles wildfires were only fully contained a few days ago. And while the residents will be dealing with the effects for years, you shouldn’t worry about anyone leaving a Lamborghini abandoned in the fires, even if you’ve seen it all over Reddit and Instagram. It wasn’t actually real. It was a CGI image made in “support” of the victims. Which would be weird, sure, but fairly harmless. Except it was one of the biggest posts on all of Reddit last month.

I came across this image while doing research for our monthly Garbage Intelligence reports (next one out Friday). And the image has gone orders of magnitude more viral than anything else on the platform. It’s, also, a depressing snapshot of how broken the online systems we used to count on have become. Let’s dive into how this happened, and why there still may be some hope for the concept of “truth,” but, also, just keep in mind, this is how much work it takes to debunk even just one of these types of images.

The sick ass wildfire Lambo was first posted to Instagram on January 9th, two days after the fires started, and the day after large-scale evacuation orders sent thousands from their homes. Fabian Oberhammer, the digital artist who created the image, told Garbage Day it was part of a larger project rendered in Octane and Cinema4D, themed around “abandoned or destroyed supercars.”

“I create one render start-to-finish every single day,” Oberhammer said in an email, adding that he hoped the post would “show some support to my friends [in LA] and anyone else in that situation.”

Before we move on, I should mention that Oberhammer’s broken car pictures do, in fact, go hard as hell — this one is my favorite. The problem is, enough people agreed and the picture quickly broke containment. Within the next few days, the image gained over 200,000 likes on Instagram, with dozens of comments from people who clearly thought it was a real photograph, while the users who could see it was CGI mostly called it insensitive.

Oberhammer said he “understood” those accusations, and attempted to set the record straight, which didn’t really go anywhere. “The whole comment section rather quickly turned from people showing support to people hating on each other,” Oberhammer said. 

What he couldn’t do was keep his viral post from going the exact kind of out of control viral that is now the only way things go viral in 2025. Four days after the original post, Oberhammer’s Lambo was posted on another Instagram account called Great Men Society, which has 1.6 million followers and normally posts content I can best describe as “Cracked.com circa 2009, but for people who are proud they can’t name 100 women.” A USA Today archive shows the caption originally suggested the image was real and it was only changed several days later after multiple fact-checks. But at least one of those reposts moved the image off Instagram to Reddit, where it really blew up.

Two days after Oberhammer’s original post, a version of the image, cropped to remove his signature, was submitted to r/InterestingAsFuck. The post quickly took off, gaining over 200,000 upvotes in a week and getting to the top of r/All, the site’s front page. Multiple Redditors noted that it was fake, but the most popular comment debunking it only received about 7,000 upvotes, which is only a tiny fraction of the people who saw the image and shared it.

This is not the first fuzzy bit of climate change-related untruth to go viral like this. When Hurricane Helene caused catastrophic flooding in North Carolina last October, social media and news sources dealt with a flood of their own. Shoddy AI-generated images that “felt real,” and so could withstand any attempt to debunk them, became too popular to ignore. These images smoothly passed through the pipeline from automated Facebook growth hackers, to racist X accounts, to the eyes and ears of the people who now run the United States government. And the incentives to game climate emergencies like this are only getting stronger for everyone involved.

Up until about 2020, historically, disaster response was one of the best, most unambiguously good things about social media. Which is still sort of true. Just look at how vital Watch Duty was for victims of the LA wildfires. But just like every other reason you used to be happy to log on, most of the platforms we use online would much rather serve us viral garbage than actually useful information. Which has turned even natural disasters into one more ingredient for the algorithmic witch’s brew that decides everything you see on major platforms. Why would Reddit or Instagram show you something useful and serious about the wildfires when they can show you a tight af fake Lambo aura farming in front of a burning neighborhood? A real photo would be worse for engagement. Makes it harder to make GTA 6 jokes in the comments.

This was, of course, unintentional on Oberhammer’s part, and, thankfully, some users are beginning to realize not every viral post like this is real. Though, now that the trick is out there, I fully expect every climate emergency for the foreseeable future to be growth-hacked to oblivion. Not out of any social or political agenda, but just because it’s something people want to see. So you might as well add Jesus in a wheelchair since it’ll maximize engagement, and any higher standard or responsibility than that has been completely given up on.

“I also got a lot of backlash for it though from people saying it is very insensitive which I also understand. I did turn off the comments on my original post,” he said. He didn’t actually delete the post, though.

New Panic World Alert!!

The X-Files meme is correct! Today we’ve got a new episode of Panic World out. It features Dylan Thuras, the co-founder of Atlas Obscura, and it’s all about Area 51. What is it? Where is it? And why is it the 51st area of wherever it is? Also, what can almost a century of conspiracy theories about Area 51 tell us about the recent New Jersey drone panic? We learn all about that and more this week. Click here to listen or find it anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Thanks To The Beehiiv Media Collective, Garbage Day Finally Has Getty Images Access, Which Means We Can Legally Run This Photo Now

I just think the photographer did a really good job capturing Elon Musk speaking to the crowd of far-right German political party last month. Very interesting angle.

In Case You Missed It, Coup Edition

We’re trying hard not to overwhelm you, dear reader, with news from Trump world. But we also understand that we have an opportunity to spread the word about what’s happening with the ongoing dismantling of American democracy. A sentence I’m not sure I ever expected to write seriously when I started this newsletter. Oh well.

In case you missed it: Republicans are drafting a bill to abolish the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). The same bill would get rid of the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO). DOGE staffers have invaded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) office and are trying to gain access to their computer systems. Project 2025 doesn’t like NOAA because NOAA tracks the weather and if you track the weather you realize that climate change is destroying the planet. DOGE is also brainstorming a way to put the US Treasury on the blockchain. DOGE wants access to the Department Of Labor, as well. The website for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has also been deleted. Which is illegal, of course. All of this is. If only someone were to do something about it. Oh, and, flights to the Guantanamo Bay migrant concentration camp have started.

On the semi-bright side of things, Democrats have finally started to act. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform tried to subpoena Elon Musk. They failed, of course. But they tried. Which is now. A “woke furry” did gain access to a popular X account belonging to right-wing nonprofit American Accountability Foundation, however, and is using it to post furry smut. Maybe the Democrats need to team up with some furries.

Andreessen Horowitz Goes Mask Off

The egg-shaped venture capital firm that’s been cheering on the end of American democracy just hired Daniel Penny, the guy who was acquitted of negligent homicide after putting Jordan Neely in a chokehold on the New York City subway in 2023. Vice President JD Vance is very excited about all of this, of course.

Penny is joining Andreessen Horowitz’s “American Dynamism team,” whatever the hell that means. In practice, I assume this is supposed to canonize Penny as another right-wing influencer that Silicon Valley can use for propaganda purposes. Speaking of which…

The scoop of Penny’s hiring was given as an exclusive to Substack’s favorite TERF blog, The Free Press, which is an important example of how this country’s conservative movement continues to understand the current vibe shift better than the Democrats. I will have more on this soon, working on a big take for next week lol. But in the meantime, have a scoop or exclusive? Give it to an indie media outlet. Doesn’t have to be Garbage Day, of course, but I wouldn’t complain if it was.

Have a general tip? You can reach us on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420, happy to keep things anonymous or off the record. 

Here’s A Very Soothing TikTok Account

@doctor_waffle

Had to use the adjective ‘baby’ (in more specific reference to the color) in place of ‘little’ for the blue one. The print on the bottom l... See more

I came across this user thanks to an X post from journalist Heidi Moore. The user name is @doctor_waffle and he has little plastic animal figurines and he sings little songs with them. This is the dangerous content that Washington doesn’t want you to see.

The Age Of Massively Complex Erotic Roleplay AI Bots Has Arrived

My buddy Bijan sent me this. I assume he’s not, uh, using it. It’s a user-made AI simulator built around the game Shin Megami Tensei. I guess there’s a character in the game called Pixie that people really want to have sex with. And this massively complex AI model lets them do that. Alright!

The site it was uploaded to, CharacterHub, lets users create wildly specific AI bot models, many of them NSFW. I saw one on there called “Your bestie's younger brother,” which has, apparently, been downloaded about 150 times. But one of the most popular models on the site, which is named Hikari, has just under 9,000 downloads. She’s an anime girl described as having, “huge boobs. I mean some serious honkers. A real set of badonkers. Packin some dobonhonkeros. Massive dohoonkabhankoloos. Big ol' tonhongerekoogers.”

A Good Kitchen Tour

@rattlegoat

my kitchen is scary #thursday #wednesday #tuesday #monday #sunday #saturday #friday #containment #catmold #rattlegoat #kitchen #cooking #s... See more

Some Stray Links

• “Proud Boys Lose Control of Their Name to a Black Church They Vandalized”

• “AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library”

P.S. here’s some ominous roof doodles.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***