Image: Abandoned mattresses and hurricane tents at the incomplete site of the Fyre Festival.
I watched the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix called Fyre. I recommend it if you haven’t seen it and if you were aware of that whole madness when it went down on social last year. Basically the short version is: someone made up a completely fake music festival that was ‘Instagram come to life’ on a private island in the Bahamas and then when people showed up it was actually Lord of the Flies. As a piece of insane performance art it’s probably one of the great works of the 21st century, but as the film shows, it was also an incident in which many innocent people were scammed and hurt. As much as we enjoy mocking the gullible people who paid thousands of dollars to live the ‘influencer lifestyle’ for a few days, many innocent Bahamian laborers, equipment rental folks and others were also massively scammed and harmed, which is not funny at all.
The main reflection I have after watching the film is how representative of a certain strata of New York life it is. It’s a strata that I have come into glancing contact with, having been acquaintances with various idle rich folks who spend great amounts of time and money dreaming up things involving famous people, huge sums of money and unlikely outcomes. This kind of scamming is almost a sport in New York, where people cultivate images of being connected and influential and play that image off against everyone around them. Usually mountains of cocaine are inextricably involved, this was one of the key details I found unrealistic in the documentary. As someone who never used cocaine I had a kind of natural immunity to some of this bullshit, but nonetheless I got swept up in my own stupid share of it. Having been a musician in New York for years, this behavior is central to a certain part of the music business, particularly the night life.
The grift is basically this: cultivate social capital and parlay it into the acquaintance of one influential or famous person. Find other connected or valuable people in the network and overplay the degree to which you are connected to the first person. Introduce those people to each other while making both think that you are closer to the other than you are. Build an aura of being connected and influential, which sort of shimmers into reality the more you repeat the process and weave more and more people into it. Then, take that fake/real network and use it to execute some business, usually in the media and entertainment field.
This is very clearly the playbook that Billy, the protagonist / villain / sociopath in chief of Fyre Festival is running. He has cultivated a marginal celebrity in Ja Rule, and uses him to parlay connections with famous Instagram models. Behind the scenes he is probably scamming investments of cash out of various rich people who want to be around the action. He uses the social and financial capital he has accrued to pay off the various parties. The models get money, he gets the aura of being around the models. Maybe the rich investors get to hang out with the models and take pictures. He creates photographic and video evidence of all this happening and uses that as the capital to launch the next scam, in this case the Fyre Festival. What is amazing about Billy’s case is that he is a true, unbound sociopath who is so divorced from reality that he makes wild promises which can be definitively verified in objective reality.
The art of the scam is that the glimmering future is always around the corner but can justifiably evaporate at any moment, without blowing back on you. Billy was crazy enough to promise something that would very clearly either exist or not, which is where it all tragicomically blows up in his face during the film. The truth of the matter is that you cannot turn around in a certain kind of New York night club without bumping into a person exactly like this, running the same scheme. The difference is only in scale and audacity.
Update: If you like me were particularly offended by the stories of the stiffed Bahamian locals who worked hard on the festival and weren’t paid, one of them has a GoFundMe page which you can donate to.
