It is hard to know what was scarier about the non-existent Fyre Festival that stranded hundreds of concert-goers on a barren Caribbean island last week: the scale of the fraud that ripped them off and placed them in discomfort and danger, or the scale of the derision that then rained upon them. The scorn of the Internet – and it was more than scorn, it was a kind of rage – was directed entirely at the hapless victims, not at the perpetrators.
In case you missed all the mocking posts and tormenting opinion pages, the brief story is this: A 25-year-old entrepreneur called Billy McFarland, who runs a talent booking agency called Fyre Media, teamed up with rapper Ja Rule to sell tickets to a music festival on a private Bahamian island. The festival was supposed to be headlined by once-famous Cali-punk band Blink 182, and featured some medium-famous other acts like Major Lazer and Migos. The tickets, which ranged from a couple of hundred to several thousand dollars each, were supposed to buy hotel accommodations and luxury meals as well as music. The advertising for the event was a video of famous models in bikinis diving into blue water, with the usual Caribbean accoutrements of yachts and white sand. The models – Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski – were promised to be in attendance as well.
The idea of it annoyed media commentators from the beginning, who saw it as brand promotion for McFarland's company rather than as a genuine musical venture: The fact that it was promoted primarily to good-looking "influencers" on social media increased its ick factor to the high-minded. It was all brand, no product.
As we now all know, on the day the festival was to begin, organizers announced it had been cancelled. It was too late. Hundreds of ticket-holders had already showed up on the island, and what they found was pretty much nothing: no music, no hotel, no gourmet food. They were housed in leaky emergency tents and fed sliced bread and processed cheese. There was little security, and some complained about having been robbed.
The organizers have promised full refunds but the purchasers say they are not optimistic. Celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos has just announced he is launching a $100-million (U.S.) class-action lawsuit against the organizers.
Basically the whole thing was a Madoff-scale deception. People lost lots of money on what looked like a legitimate event and were subjected to actual danger.
Ha ha! The schadenfreude was immediate and harsh. The reaction from Twitter – especially to the tweets of the victims – was uniformly delighted. Then opinion columns started to appear. The tropes were the same: Spoiled rich kids – "Instagram millennials" – deserved what they got. Anyone tasteless enough to spend $12,000 for a week of hedonism and second-rate music was asking for humiliation. "Fyre Festival's downfall is the hilarious nadir of festie culture," scoffed the New Republic, admitting it's hard "not to take some snide enjoyment in this seemingly perfect example of what toxic festival culture has become – faux-bohemianism morphing into hyper-capitalism."
There were a lot of jokes about Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games, probably because young people are supposed to like The Hunger Games.
The word millennial came up a lot in the derision, because obviously the prime market for this sort of pop music is young. Where did they get this kind of money? Young people are not supposed to be rich. If they are, it is obviously because their parents are rich, so they are spoiled. And they post all these photos, so they are showoffs. The fact that they were turned on by the frankly tacky appeal of the advertising meant that they were both tasteless and rich.
This kind of criticism is in fact not unusual for music festivals these days, which are growing increasingly high-end. Coachella, for example, in California, has developed a reputation as being a playground for rich airheads without much interest in music, and Nevada's Burning Man is frequently dismissed by music critics as having become corporatized and commercial, a haven for expense-account Silicon Valley startup bros.
Then Seth Rogen announced via Twitter that in fact he and some partners had been working on a movie script based exactly on this kind of scenario – an indulgent music festival gone wrong. The idea of spoiled rich kids getting in trouble in Club Paradise is already a Hollywood cliché.
These characterizations may or may not be accurate, but either way I'm not sure it means we should feel joy at the robbery and humiliation of the people we don't like.
This malevolence comes from resentment not just of inequality – at the injustice of all these young people being uselessly rich at a time of high youth unemployment throughout the Western world – but also at Instagram: at the fact that we have to see young people in their bikinis on beaches. We weren't so aware of them before.
But it is also evidence of a free-floating rage in the air, a widespread skepticism of privilege in the United States and the unstoppable desire of entertainment vendors to tap the "brand" of privilege and sell it to suckers – it's the same kind of anger that led to the successes of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump; a sense that there's something fundamentally illusory about all these images of models and beaches, an emotional belief that there's something wrong and it's not fair.