How to go viral in 2026, as told by Jimothy

It’s only been a week and a half since Jimothy, the adorable raccoon presumably with short spine syndrome, went from local Seattle curiosity to internet phenomenon to the apex of all culture. It’s been a wild ride, and one that’s given us a unique opportunity to track how Having Fun Online spreads across social media and beyond in 2026.

Even though we are talking about an extremely round raccoon, there’s an important story buried in here. One of the weirder, but nevertheless important questions right now is who — or what platform or what political party — is in the driver’s seat of culture? The right wing wants you to think they are. Elon Musk wants you to think X is, as I wrote last week. The media and Hollywood wants you to think they still have a some role to play in all of this. And all the recent fretting over whether the band Geese or the streamer Clavicular has actual irl fans all lives downstream of this.

The social platforms we all use every day haven’t changed much in the last 15 years, aside form the introduction of TikTok and the relegated status of Facebook. But the way we use them has changed. Long gone are the days of the simple viral story, where one unit of content — a post, a video, an image — was enough to go viral the same way everywhere. Now, cultural moments like Jimothy come remixed on arrival, filtered through the incentives and idiosyncrasies of whatever platform you use to consume the news, whatever the word “news” means these days. Which is why Jimothy makes for such an interesting case study.

This is the definitive story of how a little raccoon dominated our feeds in the span of just five days. And just to spoil that story a bit, I can say that, no, Musk and his Everything App did not really play much of a role.