If you spend a lot of hour on social media, then you’ve likely heard about music and culture event Fyre Festival the exclusive Bahamas getaway all the fairly people were headed to this week. If Coachella was for the plebs, Fyre Festival was supposedly for the truly cool.
And because the festival is for the truly chill, you can accuse thousands of dollars for it. After all, getting fairly people to shill for products of questionable effectiveness is a hallmark of the influencer industry. So it’s understandable why the people behind Fyre Festival( A.K.A. Ja Rule) would accuse a minimum of $1,500?
If you haven’t been living under a stone, you probably have an idea of “whats happened” next: The celebration, billed as a luxury getaway, just about imploded on all fronts, with musicians pulling out, laughably bad food, deficiency of accommodations, and so on.
Fortunately( or regrettably if you’re Fyre Festival ), now everyone knows about the disaster because a bunch of social media-savvy people who paid a lot of money for something that turned out to be a disaster objective up … posting about it on social media for us all to enjoy. And in the process supported everyone’s worst premises about social media influencers: they’re utter nonsense.
The promotion
For a first-time celebration, Fyre had plenty of media and social media buzz much of it centered around the influencer blitz.
“Hey quick topic: What’s Fyre Festival, and why “re all the” models in the Bahamas promoting it? ” asked Fashionista back in December. “And most importantly, will it be lit? ” the subhead added.
“Can a critical mass of Victoria’s Secret Models and a Hadid dedicate Bahamas tourism an Insta-boost? ” asked Vanity Fair .
Hell, even Kendall Jenner was involved.
If influencers have turned social media platforms into a gigantic version of high school( complete with the social stratification ), Fyre Festival seemed to represent a chance to hang with the cool kids and get a savour of “peoples lives” for world prices. Many bundles included chartered airfare and “glamping” accommodations. There was even a $ 400,000 bundlethat offered a house on the “VIP island” that included “dinner with a performer.”
It’s an attractive offer to people who follow Instagram stars and see “peoples lives” behind their sunset-on-the-beach photographs.
Think: less music celebration, more a millennial version of those fantasy rock-and-roll camps.
The festival
Turns out, it’s fairly hard putting on a gigantic event with tons of moving parts.
Problems is currently being apparent in the weeks leading up to the event: Deadlines missed for paying artists, embarrassment spread about traveling logistics. The event’s cofounders even had to seek outside investments to pay for costs, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal .
Perhaps even more interesting? Fyre came right after Coachella, among the biggest and most successful U.S. music celebrations. People who bought Fyre bundles conceivably picked it over Coachella, which had a better lineup of acts and, you know, the promise that it would actually happen.
The promotion ran and the celebration was sold out of general admission tickets. Bad press somehow wasn’t able to overcome bikini-clad models on boats.
Meanwhile, Fyre organizer Ja Rule was speaking at SXSW on a panel about authenticity in ad. You honestly can’t making such material up.
The aftermath
Fyre Festival objective like it began as a social media firestorm, though not the behavior its organizers intended.
By Friday morning, the schadenfreude was in full swing. Twitter, Instagram, even Reddit were filled with fright narratives. The organizers cancelled the celebration, and transport was a mess. There wasn’t even beer.
This tweet of food, allegedly from the celebration, summed up much of it.
Hey @GordonRamsay what the fuck is you rate #fyrefestival gourmet dinners? pic.twitter.com/ SYJIgwAIYp
Rain Man (@ omgRainMan) April 28, 2017
Are we all running a little overboard in our pleasure of this catastrophe? Yes, but not without reason. Fyre Festival brought together so much of what many people find disgusting about social media affect crass materialism, braggadocious pride, empty aspirations and packaged them into a single event. Then, it supported our premises that the entire scene is fake.
When a bunch of pretty people pay big bucks to discover that fact we all already know social media is intensely staged it’s hard not to giggle, especially when entire thing was then roasted by the same social media platforms that made this possible in the first place.
Now, please associates itself with this post on your social media feeds.
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