The Fyre Festival offers an important lesson, but has anyone actually learned from it?
The Fyre Festival offers an important lesson, but is anyone actually learning from it? Alex Wong
The video was the beginning of the lie. The first time anyone heard about Fyre Festival was when, as part of a coordinated promotional campaign designed by Billy McFarland and his company, Fyre Media Inc., the world’s most prominent celebrity influencers — including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski — all posted an image of an orange tile on their Instagram pages with a link to a promotional video.
Images of models, white sand beaches, teal-coloured water and ambiguous concert performances were spliced together to invite wannabe trend-setters to The Bahamas for the greatest music festival event ever. Alist performers. Luxury villas. Gourmet meals. The experience of a lifetime. It was the perfect social statusen hancing getaway for clout-chasing millennials. Within 48 hours of the Instagram ad campaign, 95 per cent of the 6,000 tickets allotted, many of which were selling for thousands of dollars, had been sold.
But when everyone arrived, they found a concert venue that had been hastily thrown together. Instead of gorgeous villas overlooking the ocean, festival-goers were invited to stay inside tents with rain-soaked mattresses, in an area with no cell-phone reception, internet service or running water. Gourmet meals were nowhere to be found. To top it all off, there was no music at all. Headline acts, including Blink-182, had dropped out at the last minute.
As the remote location filled with stranded concert attendees, the chaos unfolded in real time. Fyre Festival became a trending topic on social media; the memes and jokes permeated Twitter. Everyone was quick to mock the hopeless millennials who paid thousands of dollars to attend. A photo of a cheese sandwich in a foam container tweeted by someone at Fyre Festival became the enduring image of the music festival that never happened.
McFarland, the entitled and inconsiderate scammer masquerading as a businessman, didn’t have the wherewithal to actually pull off the festival he promoted. The result was, yes, an easy target for mockery found in the young and privileged concert-goers, but also far more severe consequences that went largely ignored during the rush to meme-ify the moment.
Two competing Fyre Festival documentaries released by Hulu (Fyre) and Netflix (Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened) address this side of the story and reveal a tale of terrible exploitation. As one talking head noted in the Hulu documentary: “It would be funny if it wasn’t criminal.”
While neither doc lends much sympathy to the millennials who were exploited by a fraudulent marketing campaign — in one scene from the Netflix doc, an attendee, brags about how his friends flipped mattresses and urinated in tents in order to establish their own private territory to hang out at the campgrounds — they do show how easy it is to get caught up in the surreal aspects of the entire Fyre Festival saga. The vapidity. The entitlement. The social media. It seems custom-built for our times.
No other story can boast a cast of characters that include a chief pilot who learned how to fly using a Microsoft Flight Simulator, a person named MDavid, Ja Rule (a partner in the event) insisting it wasn’t fraud if nobody died and Andy King, an event producer who agreed — at McFarland’s request — to perform oral sex on a Bahamian customs officer so that four trucks full of Evian water bottles would be released for the event. (He didn’t end up having to go through with it.)
But Fyre Festival is about more than just these absurd tidbits and the ridiculous sequence of events that birthed a million tweets. Local labourers in The Bahamas worked overtime every single day in the weeks leading up to the event to create a concert venue that would be somewhat presentable, and when McFarland and his company bailed on the event, none of the workers were compensated for their efforts. In the most heartbreaking moment of the Netflix doc, Maryann Rolle, a Bahamian restaurateur who served meals to everyone at the festival, teared up as she detailed how $50,000 of her personal savings was withdrawn in order to compensate the local workers who were left empty-handed. (A Go Fund Me campaign was started for Rolle after the documentary’s release, and has raised over $200,000.)
It’s tempting to draw the conclusion that these docs are meant to be damning to McFarland or act as a comment on an entire generation that has already received its fair share of criticism for being self-absorbed and prone to vacuous pursuits — but the ultimate indictment is on our own myopic response to the events unfolding in real-time. The two films act as a reminder that behind every scam, there are real life consequences we seldom stop to consider, thanks to an eagerness to engage in the social media discourse. If the festival was definitively millennial, so too was our reaction: a cycle of mockery, followed by outrage; first for likes, then for status.
And therein lies yet another shame: the lack of lessons being learned through this whole ordeal.
McFarland is currently serving a six-year sentence after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud. Before his incarceration, he taped a sit-down interview for the Hulu documentary. Confronted about everything that happened at Fyre Festival, he replied, “So many things had to go right to make this big of a failure.” The remark is a bit like a thief who burglarizes your home, but then credits himself with being a good houseguest because he didn’t stay too long. It also shows a man who is still not fully comfortable with accepting the responsibility of his actions, even as he pays for it.
In this, McFarland has potentially — and most certainly, inadvertently — provided something of great benefit to his generation: an awareness that there are consequences to not only our actions, but also our ignorance.