“Since 2016, Fyre has been the most talked about festival in the world,” organiser Billy McFarland told a US broadcaster when tickets for Fyre 2 went on sale this week. McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison for wire fraud in 2018, related to his organisation of the first Fyre (he served only four). Whatever you think about the first Fyre – with its limp cheese sandwiches, its disaster-relief-tent accommodation, the absence of advertised headliners, the $26m of unpaid debt, the rats (were the rats influencer hyperbole? Perhaps, but on the other hand the festival happened on the parking lot of an abandoned resort development, and where else is a rat supposed to live?), you have to admit it lived up to one promise: it was legendary.
Wire fraud is any swindling that happens electronically, whether by text, email, phone or social media. It’s so easy to fall on the wrong side of that – you could commit it just by sending a round robin, asking for a million dollars. Really, all that is standing between so many of us and jail is the sucker who will give us a million dollars. It’s really the suckers who belong in prison, if you think about it. Anyway, back to McFarland. “Obviously, a lot of that [talk] has been negative … but if it’s done well, I think Fyre has the chance to be this annual festival that really takes over the festival industry,” he said.
To throw the guy a bone, he built a huge amount of global notoriety over a very short time, and it would be a shame not to monetise this. Promotion for Fyre 1 started in December 2016, and by 27 April 2017, the festival had become a universal analogy for everything in the world that was bad. People who had flocked there, paying from $500 to $12,000 for tickets, had responded to the siren call of models and actors advertising the festival on Instagram. Within hours, it was the white-hot centre of schadenfreude.
This tribe of festivalgoers had something deeper in common than merely being fools who had parted with their money. They had made certain assumptions about the festival, assuming it would form a backdrop for a fabricated life they could project on their socials. To witness their horror at sodden mattresses and cancelled flights, queues stretching hours to arrive at a wasteland, had the satisfying comeuppance of an Enid Blyton book. Look who got too big for their boots, and now their boots are full of untreated sewage.
But this was only the overture. As the festival was cut short and the lawsuits began, the full hubris of McFarland unfurled. Professionals from every festival-related sector had lined up to tell him his investment wasn’t enough, his prep time was too short, he didn’t have the experience or skills or networks he needed, and he forged on anyway, becoming the poster boy for unhinged self-belief. In a world so dominated by the virtual, public shame has become the last line of defence against shitehawks faking it till they make it. What’s to stop a crypto bro simply saying he’s a billionaire until he is one? What stands between a very humble genius ascending to the point that he can assert his genius and humility by executive order? It’s a dicey old game. Sometimes, reality wins (Sam Bankman-Fried); other times, it loses (Donald Trump). So when the results land and it is Crowd 1 Naked Emperor 0, people really savour that.
Besides the monsoon that arrived at Fyre 1, turning a bleak and comfortless event into one that posed an active hazard to public health, there was one other stroke of incredible bad luck for McFarland: his wasn’t the only enterprise mired in chaos. Trump had commenced his first term in office, splashing falsehood over everything, and firing cabinet members and staff during infantile tantrums. In Britain, we were in that nightmarish first phase of Brexit, when it was still impossible to believe that people so unprepared, so thoughtless and so histrionic could be steering the ship. Over time, “this is like the Fyre festival” became the standard expression of dismay to describe a range of political developments. For at least some of this long period, McFarland would have been in prison. Hopefully, for his own sake, he missed the extent of his gift to the English language, a shorthand for incompetence so profound that it defies analysis.
But Fyre 2 “isn’t about the past”, McFarland says. This time he’s dreaming bigger, with the most expensive tickets priced at $1.1m. You have to love the audacity of that last $100,000. The so-called “Prometheus pass” gets you access to the fight team next to the “fight pit”, and really, who knows what that means – maybe you get to be beaten unconscious by Tyson Fury, or maybe it’s just a ringside seat to a thumb wrestle between two marketing managers, and the surprise is part of the point, guys, because “the origin of the Prometheus pass is shrouded in secrecy … Legend has it that it was inspired by the titan Prometheus”. Huh, yeah, sounds plausible. Can’t think of any other Prometheuses.
Fyre 1 ignited because it was a harbinger of shitshows to come. The remake looks like the supremacy of the fantasists. What could be more 2025?
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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