Fyre Festival - Turning a dream into a dumpster fire

Just finished watching the Netflix documentary and planning to watch the hulu one when I get the chance.

Pretty crazy how this whole thing just kept going and building steam when there were SOOOO many signs that it was going to turn into a massive disaster. Partially I just want to blame the shallowness of our modern day “influencers” in promoting something they have no real insight on, but then I guess they exist in a grey area without any obligation to provide any objective commentary.

Everytime you saw Billy in the film with his douchy smile, I wondered why anyone was buying his bullshit.

This is the fluff of Instagram in reality. Selling a dream / idea without any basis in facts behind it. Everyones life is fabulous in this world until you look behind the curtain.

Anyway… Off to track down that second film.
Anyone else watch them?

I watched both. I guess the Hulu one has some problems because they paid for the main guy’s participation? I don’t know the details, but I did like that the Hulu one goes much harder into the whole “influencer culture” issue.

The Fyre debacle was amazing though. I love how the whole incident could be summed up with that infamous image of the cheese sandwich and salad.

While it’s fun to dunk on instagrammers et.al., the real core here is that here’s a guy that committed a lot of actual fraud. Not just misleading instagram models fraud, but like, actual SEC, inventing-millions-of-dollars-of-revenue fraud. The more pertinent story is the venture-funding / investment structures that allowed him to do so.

And then there was the just plain gross incompetence, like getting booted off their island for breaking agreements around their marketing messaging. The Netflix doc in passing mentions that a festival like that usually takes like 9-12 months to plan. Fyre festival had a conception -> festival timeline of like 9-12 weeks. The actual professionals in the room should have just been saying no from the very beginning, but didn’t (except for that one pilot dude, good on him). It seems like there was a lot of madness of crowds going on where everybody is just thinking “well, if the other guys thinks they can pull it off their part, maybe I can, too.” Later in the film, one of the event-setup guys says something like “it seemed like a shit-show, but every event seems like a shit-show right until it actually starts.”

To me, it feels a lot like a parable about nobody being able to just say “no” in a corporate setting, for various reasons (loss aversion, inexperience, needing the paycheck, etc).

The thing that really hit me on the Netflix one was that closing bit. This guy wasn’t paid. He left the island because he was getting threatened and was afraid for his life. Billy was convicted of fraud and went to prison. And yet, he seems perfectly happy to take Billy’s calls (presumably from prison?) and chat with him. WTF.

In case anyone missed it.

(She’s featured in the Netflix one.)

If they received consideration for the promotion, they have an obligation to disclose that fact. Most of them did not.

Very much this. Also, the thing that boggles my mind is that (deliberate fraud aside) this was all in service of a talent booking website, led by someone whose previous business was basically events organising, to the extent it wasn’t also a scam. And yet they were really really bad at talent booking and events organising. They interviewed someone who was put in charge of booking acts late in the day, who said they’d never done talent booking before. WTF? That’s the entire premise (again, scam aside) of McFarland’s two businesses. How does he not have someone with that expertise?

This whole scam feels like the music festival version of Star Citizen. Can’t wait to see the competing documentaries on that one, if their scam ever actually ends. @dsmart, I assume you’ll be a featured speaker on both!

There seem to be two components to the mess, a bunch of trust fund millennial clowns overly enamoured of the power of marketing who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, and then a major fraudster, seemingly quite a nasty piece of work.

Most peoples’ sympathy probably goes to the restaurant lady and the working folk who didn’t get paid.

The documentary was interesting to watch like a train wreck. It’s also interesting to get some insight into this whole ‘influencer’ culture, which I intentionally stay as far away from as I possibly can in day to day life.

One of the moments that resonated with me was seeing the teleconference after the festival was over, and Billie / Ja Rule were still trying to present all of this as a marketing snafu that they can bounce back from. ‘No one died, we didn’t hurt anybody’, ‘it’s just like Samsung with the exploding phones’, etc. Also the official statements saying that the festival will be ‘postponed’ and that only ‘V1 had failed’. This isn’t disaster management, it’s a display of self-deception and utter delusion.

I also thought it was interesting that the twitter account set up to expose the festival’s lies prior to the event got zero hits. Going viral on social media is a tough thing and can fail even with explosive controversial content.

I want to watch this. Somewhat O.T. (but not really), here’s an excellent read about the greatest dumpster fire (literally) in festival history:

image

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Billy’s two companies were trendy startup businesses, but the festival wasn’t actually related to either except insofar as someone thought of doing a promotional event for Fyre that Billy took in this wildly overambitious direction that ended up eating all the focus. So most of the people at Fyre proper weren’t involved and those that did get dragged in were clearly not skilled at this unrelated project. And then he got a bunch of people who actually knew what they were doing to fund and manage it but on completely unrealistic timelines.

And the thing is, Billy himself clearly committed huge amounts of fraud but it’s not really clear what the point was. He doesn’t seem to have particularly profited by it, outside of the partying he got to do with supermodels. It just seems like he had this wild thing he wanted to do that he kept pushing ahead with no matter how much he had to cheat and lie to prop it up. And he’s described as actually breaking down in tears at points as things were unraveling towards the end, like he was super invested in making this dumb, impossible thing happen.

I watched about half last night, and all I’ve taken away so far is that Billy has one of those faces that doesn’t look complete without a fist in it.

The end of the Netflix documentary definitely shows that he is nothing but a con-man, and it’s clear the second he gets out of jail (in 5 more years I guess?) he will be right back to scamming people.

What I mean is traditionally con men are scamming people for, y’know, money or whatever personal gain, and it sure seems like Billy actively lost big on Fyre.

Really, that just felt like him being finally confronted with a situation that he couldn’t talk himself out of. See also his comments on “I’m not going to jail”.

He’s an obvious sociopath, and a short-sighted one.

The Netflix doc touched on this briefly towards the end when discussing his post-bail lifestyle. Something like “he seemed to simply expect that he should be hanging out with millionaires and partying with models, not because he’s booking an event, but because that’s the lifestyle he ‘deserves’.” It’s not a question of actually having money, it’s just a question of whether he’s able to act like he has money, which the whole thing allowed him to do.

He sounds like a pretty obvious narcissist.

I started watching this, got to the bit where the supermodels and team were filming and one guy was shouting at the girls demanding they did something and his attitude in speaking to them was so shit i turned it off. I have a short attention span for douchebags.

I haven’t seen either, but apparently the netflix version is a bit problematic as well, in that the documentary was produced by the same companies responsible for promoting the festival.

I mean, the people who made the promo video were involved at a point before the folks at Fyre even sold tickets. It’s questionable how much blame they really have in the whole thing.

Yeah but isn’t that the point? Marketing cart before the actual thing horse.

It would have been wonderful, and it would all have gone swimmingly, if they’d started planning the effing festival with professional festival-organizing people, and had some sense of how it would actually turn out before they made the promo video (no blame to the actual videomakers, they did a great job).

It’s just your usual coked-up bullshit, only in my day (former music biz pro) people knew how to do practical things while on drugs. :)