Share this Story: The Fyre Festival offers an important lesson, but is anyone actually learning from it? The Fyre Festival offers an important lesson, but is anyone actually learning from it? Alex Wong: The vapidity. The entitlement. The social media. It seems custom-built for our times. Photo by Netflix Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. Article content 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. We apologize, but this video has failed to load. tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or The Fyre Festival offers an important lesson, but is anyone actually learning from it? Back to 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. A-list performers. Luxury villas. Gourmet meals. The experience of a lifetime. It was the perfect social status-enhancing 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. Advertisement Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Article content Photo by AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File 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 became the enduring image of the music festival that never happened. Advertisement Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Article content 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. Advertisement Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Article content 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.) Photo by Netflix/Twitter 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 GoFundMe campaign was started for Rolle after the documentary’s release, and has raised over $200,000.) Advertisement Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Article content 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. More On This Topic Drake, Cardi B and Kendrick Lamar lead Grammy Award nominations Music may have been big in 2018, but no one album managed to dominate Advertisement Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Article content 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. Share this article in your social network Advertisement Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Shopping essentials Advertisement Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. NP Posted Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. Email Address There was an error, please provide a valid email address. By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. You may unsubscribe any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails. Postmedia Network Inc. | 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4 | 416-383-2300 Thanks for signing up! A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it please check your junk folder. The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again Trending<doc-sep>Models in the commercial included Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and Chanel Iman, which featured them frolicking and swimming in the Bahamas. The models also posted photos from the commercial filming on Instagram and participated in broader social media promotion with paid posts. Jenner may also be forced to disclose more details about a $250,000 payment for a Fyre Festival-sponsored Instagram post. In the now-deleted post, she announced that members of G.O.O.D Music record label were slated to perform and included a discount code for fans to purchase admission tickets. Jenner did not disclose that the post was paid and received a warning from the Federal Trade Commission, which mandates that such social media sponsorships must be disclosed to the public.<doc-sep>
DUBAI: The fallout from the ill-fated Fyre Festival of 2017 continues to unfold and now the models who starred in the promotional video for the event and posted about it on their social media accounts — including the likes of Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner — are back in the headlines. According to US media, IMG Models, which represents models Hadid and Hailey Bieber, and DNA Model Management, which represents Emily Ratajkowski, could be forced to reveal details about the payments they received from the festival’s founder and promoter Billy McFarland after a judge issued subpoenas as part of Fyre’s bankruptcy filing. A subpoena is also expected for model Kendall Jenner’s company, Kendall Jenner INC, as investigators try to piece together what happened to the millions of dollars paid out by McFarland in the run-up to the failed festival. Fyre Festival’s bankruptcy trustee, Gregory Messer, filed an ex-parte order in bankruptcy court in order to examine McFarland’s dealings with the agencies and it was approved on Monday. Officials say McFarland, who was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018, raised $26 million from investors and now a bankruptcy court is attempting to find out how the money was used. (File photo: AFP) According to court documents seen by US news show Entertainment Tonight (ET), Messer asked that 24 parties, called “examinees,” be subpoenaed, including IMG Models, DNA Model Management, Kendall Jenner INC, United Talent Agency and others. According to ET, the subpoenas are seeking to understand how the models and their respective agencies were paid to promote the festival on social media. In October 2018, a federal judge gave the creator of the highly publicized Fyre Festival in the Bahamas a six-year prison term. McFarland was sentenced in federal court in Manhattan. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald called him a “serial fraudster,” the Associated Press reported at the time. He admitted defrauding investors of $26 million in the 2017 music festival and over $100,000 in a fraudulent ticket-selling scheme after his arrest in the festival scam. (File photo: AFP) Buchwald said McFarland deserved a long prison term because he disrespected the criminal justice system by lying to law enforcement agents when they learned about the ticket-selling business. Speaking in a courtroom packed with friends and family and at least one victim, McFarland apologized as family members cried behind him. The festival has been subject of two recent documentary films, “Fyre Fraud” on Hulu and Netflix’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.”