SECOND THOUGHTS ON FYRE FESTIVAL

It is now six years since the disastrous Fyre Festival came and went, and except for some entertaining YouTube documentaries and a few press pieces on the release of its organizer from prison, it is largely forgotten -- one more viral sensation consigned to the dustbin of internet history. It seems to me, however, that the whole sordid saga of Fyre -- how it came to be, how it failed, and the aftermath -- has something important to tell us about the state of the modern world.

For those who have indeed forgotten, or never cared to begin with, the Fyre Festival was a musical festival held in 2017 on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas, to promote the Fyre app, which was created to book musical talent. Fyre was the brainchild of an unknown "entrepreneur" named Billy McFarlane and fading rapper Ja Rule. After a brilliant internet marketing campaign, which featured famous models running through the surf and yachts swirling through crystal blue waters, approximately five thousand people showed up to enjoy "an immersive music festival ... two transformative weekends ... on the boundaries of the impossible." For hefty price-tags, concertgoers were to enjoy a slew of the world's hottest entertainment acts and gourmet food while staying in villas or luxurious tents on the beach. It was to be a party for the ages, but more than that, an opportunity for those with the means to be there to flaunt their presence to the world. Fyre was, as we used to say in the 80s "the place to be" for wealthy hipsters and social media influencers.

Though few people knew it, McFarlane had no idea what he was doing, and though many people knew it, they apparently ignored the fact that Ja Rule has never known what he is doing. They were the two of them, however, very good at bluster. McFarlane was a college dropout with no real business experience who bluffed investors into forking over enough money to secure celebrity endorsements and craft a slick marketing campaign. Rule was a clueless rapper on the far margins of relevancy hoping to revitalize his brand. Together they were able to generate a great deal of interest and publicity for the two-week event, but it was all smoke and remained smoke until it finally dissipated. Not only did they have no actual plan to bring the concert about, they had neither the money nor the time to execute one even had it actually existed. A concert on the scale they envisioned would have employed an army of hundreds if not several thousand workers, food service people, security, drivers, medical staff, etc., etc., and required massive quantities of construction materials as well as supplies of fresh drinking water, food, sanitation facilities, reliable elecricity and so on. Those (belatedly) consulting said they'd need an additional year (on top of the one they'd already had) and another $46 million in funds to make it happen. None of this existed by the time the concert began, and as a result most of the acts signed to perform canceled at the last moment: none ever performed.

At this point I defer to Wikipedia for what actually happened:

Initial arrivals were taken to an "impromptu beach party" at a beachside restaurant, where they were plied with alcohol and kept waiting for around six hours while frantic preparations at the festival site continued. McFarland had hired hundreds of local Bahamian workers to help build the site. Meanwhile, organizers had to renegotiate the guarantees they offered to the people who would be playing at the festival as costs spiraled out of control. Later arrivals were taken directly to the grounds by school bus where the true state of the festival's site became apparent: their accommodations were little more than scattered disaster relief tents with dirt floors, some with mattresses that were soaking wet as a result of the morning rain. The gourmet food accommodations were nothing more than inadequate and poor quality food (including cheese sandwiches served in foam containers).

Festival-goers were dropped off at the production bungalow where McFarland and his team were based so they could be registered, but after hours of waiting in vain, people rushed to claim their own tents. Although there were only about 500 people, there were not enough tents and beds for the guests, so they wound up stealing from others. Attendees were unable to leave the festival for the nearby Sandals resorts as it was peak season, with almost every hotel on Great Exuma already fully booked for the annual Exuma Regatta. Around nightfall, a group of local musicians took to the stage and played for a few hours, the only act to perform at the event. In the early morning, it was announced that the festival would be postponed and that the attendees would be returned to Miami as soon as possible.

Reports from the festival mentioned various other problems, such as the mishandling or theft of guests' baggage, no lighting to help people find their way around, an unfinished gravel lot, a lack of medical personnel or event staff, no cell phone or internet service, insufficient portable toilets, no running water and heavy-handed security. These problems were exacerbated as the festival had been promoted as a cashless event, leaving many attendees without money for taxi fare or other expenses.

Many attendees were reportedly stranded, as flights to and from the island were cancelled after the Bahamian government issued an order that barred any planes from landing at the airport. The first flight back to Miami boarded at 1:30 a.m. on April 28, but was delayed for hours due to issues with the flight's manifest. It was cancelled after sunrise, and passengers were locked in the Exuma Airport terminal with no access to food, water[26] or air conditioning; a passenger recalled that at least one person passed out from the heat and had to be hospitalized.

The failure went viral, with many ticket-holders livestreaming their discomfiture for millions to see, and "Fyre Festival" became a synonym for disaster. Some critics humorously likened what happened to LORD OF THE FLIES or THE HUNGER GAMES. A slew of lawsuits were filed, and Billy McFarlane eventually went to prison for fraud.

A surface examination of this debacle is always good for a few laughs. There is nothing quite like the collapse of a gigantic scam, be it Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos or Bernie Madoff and his ponzi scheme Madoff LLC; and there is nothing so satisfying as watching rich, entitled, over-privileged hipster/jet-setter/influencer types eat a little of the shit the common folk are forced to digest every day. A deeper examination, however, tells us a great deal about the effects that social media and the internet have had on human psychology, and the further, harmful effects those raised on this psychology can inflict on others.

Obviously there will always be people like Billy McFarlane: glib, shallow, irresponsible corner-cutters who will do anything for money except work for it are as old as civilization. He is nothing new, and he may not even consciously have intended to commit fraud when he hatched this scheme. In fact, I think it more likely that he believed he could pull it off, and, liars being most skillful at lying to themselves, believed to the very end that he could shuck and jive his way through the disaster that actually unfolded before him. The key phrase in "con man" is "confidence," after all, a word which has more than one meaning. No, what is interesting here is the very nature of the Fyre Festival. Three salient points come to view if we stop chuckling long enough to look for them:

1. It was built entirely around image;
2. It appealed to vanity, narcissism and a certain type of greed.
3. It hurt people who actually matter.

I think you would agree that most events -- sporting, musical, comedic, what have you -- are attended for the purposes of entertainment, which is to say enjoyment. One goes because one wants to go and expects to take pleasure in the experience as a thing in itself. When I saw Micky Ward fight Arturo Gatti at the Mohegan Sun, when I watched John Cleese tell jokes at the Strand, when I showed up to listen to John Williams conduct his orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, I did these things because I was hoping for the satisfaction of a particular, personal desire. I would have gone had I been the only one in the audience and no cameras permitted. Like you and your own public private passions, I am driven by love, active interest, or at least curiosity, in the subject matter. When I saw Mazzy Star in Ventura some years ago, the band forbade the use of cameras at the show, and shone no lights except for candles on the stage: they wanted the audience to enjoy the music, not mere spectacle.

The Fyre Festival, however, represents an advancement on an idea which used to exist only a small scale and for a particular group of people: those who considered it of vital importance "to see and be seen," i.e. people in the entertainment industry or the bored rich, the society-charity folk who value their press clippings as much as their money. The internet has made the idea of experiencing something strictly for its own merits and for one's own pleasure to be eccentric, even contemptible. Now, people collect experiences not for their own sake but to boast about it on social media and thus project a "curated life," the Instagram-sham existence in which frauds like Dan Blizerian sit in rented Ferraris in front of rented mansions with bevvies of bikini models who are being paid for their time, in the hopes that dupes on the internet will believe what they are seeing is an actual lifestyle. And the boasting is not of the ordinary kind, i.e. to make oneself look good, but one consciously intended to make others feel actively jealous. It is not an appeal to entertainment or enjoyment, but to vanity and narcissism and arrogance and even cruelty: it is a projection of raw capitalist fantasy, the idea that not merely a luxurious and hedonistic lifestyle is the apotheosis of human existence, but that it is a measure of worth -- human worth.

The Fyre Festival did more than dupe cretins of this type out of a few thousand dollars and some unearned dignity. Its impact was felt the most severely on those could afford it the least. To save money and to try and salvage what he could from the disaster, McFarland hired a very large number of local workers to make last-minute preparations at the site of the festival. None of these people were ever paid for their work. Innocent Bahamanians were harmed and in a few cases even financially wiped out, when their generous donations of food (to hungry festival-goers) went unremunerated: and this was the least-reported aspect of the entire squalid episode. Those (like myself, admittedly, at the time) who were deriving enormous pleasure from seeing modern-day Marie Antoinettes told there was no cake, paid little attention to the real economic hardship and pain this brought ordinary working people. My dismissiveness of this pain was probably part psychological: the story becomes less funny the more you think about the actual effects, so a superficial view is safest. But this is not a full answer. The truth is that ordinary working people are, under the internet rubric, not as important as people with money: actually less than human, lumpen, faceless drones, "non player characters" who ultimately don't matter. The temporary discomfiture of a few hundred trust-fund jockeys and well-heeled party girls is of far more interest to most than the actual suffering and ruination of an equal number of working stiffs.

One could argue forcefully that this too is as old as civilization, and one would be right; the difference is that this mentality used to be reserved to a very small proportion of the population, something at the five percent mark or less, and that these people kept as much to themselves as possible. The internet has figuratively dissolved the iron gates and stone walls that separated the nobleman, the robber-baron or tycoon, from the rest of us: it seems to exist primarily, in some spaces anyway, for throwing material success through those barriers and into our faces. "I live on a yacht. I own eight Lambos. I go to Vegas and drop a mil at the tables and laugh all the way to my private jet." Again, the point is not merely to boast, but to taunt. To lack empathy and sympAthy is one thing, but to incline toward this shallow form of sadism is quite another, and the internet has not merely legitimized it, it has fetishized it, twisted it into a species of virtue.

This at any rate is what I think about when I remember the Fyre Festival. It was a frank appeal to vanity, exclusivity, snobbery and that peculiar form of greed, the greed for attention and envy. It failed and ended in disaster, but its lessons went largely and perhaps totally unlearned. It had no substance, it was never anything but smoke, as indeed all the emotions it appealed to were smoke, but as any decent firefighter will tell you, it's always the smoke that kills you.