What’s up guys?
Jared here with our third Wisecrack vlog.
The internet has been ablaze revisiting the complete shit show that was 2017’s Fyre
festival since two documentaries were released on Hulu and Netflix.
It seems that people can’t stop thinking it, and I don’t think it’s simply because
we can’t look away from a train derailing.
Fyre Festival is the perfect symbol for a lot of things happening in our culture right
now.
For those of you who DON’T know, a 25-year-old “entrepreneur” named Billy McFarland and
Ja-Rule sold thousands of tickets to a music festival in the Bahamas
by paying a bunch of instagram’s most popular influencers to appear in a promotional video
promising an experience of a lifetime.
Problem is, this festival had no chance of happening.
They promised an exclusive island once owned by Pablo Escobar.
They were given the backyard of a Sandals resort.
They were promised Luxurious accommodations.
They were given wet mattresses in overpopulated FEMA tents - and a cruel interpretation of
Meatless Monday.
They were promised nights of models, drinking, and dancing while listening to a legendary
lineup.
They got a night locked in the Bahamas airport hungover and starving.
Turns out, Billy’s been defrauding investors this whole time and gets sentenced to 6 years
behind bars.
People have criticized this event from every angle- whether it’s the absurdity of Silicon
Valley Hustle culture, Billy’s seeming sociopathy,
or FuckJerry’s dubious role in all this there’s certainly no shortage of digital
ink spilled on the Fyre Festival.
But rather than thinking about Fyre Fest as some weird aberration of modern culture, we
like to think of it as a definitive microcosm of the world we live in.
So welcome to this luxurious, curated experience from the minds of Wisecrack as we take an
exclusive journey into the bowels of Fyre Fest.
Let’s start off talking about the rich and powerful.
Since the establish of monarchy, and nobility in general, people have flaunted their status
with objects.
We’ve dug up pre-historic graves decked out with ancient bling: precious metals, jewelry,
and pottery.
Even with the decline of nobility in places like Europe, nothing much changed.
Your upstart “new money” merchants sought to emulate the old rich by wearing the same
clothes and owning the same shit.
Fast forward to today, where young people are often, at least in part, rejecting this
logic.
It’s not that people don’t want nice cars or clothes anymore,
but younger generations have put a newfound premium on “experiences.”
And don’t get me wrong, this is great.
There’s evidence out there that says you’ll be happier spending a thousand bucks on a
vacation than say, a 4k gaming monitor.
Many of today’s trust fund kids don’t necessarily flash their cash, but instead
pretend to be broke hipsters flaunting their culture and worldliness.
But among this generally positive trend, something dark has emerged.
Experiences themselves have become fake.
Enter: Fyre Fest.
Fyre Festival is the quintessential experience to sell to rich pe…
I mean, uh, PUNCTUATION: people of wealth
It’s the party of all parties.
Something reserved for the best of the best.
More than something to spend thousands of dollars on, Fyre is an affirmation of who
you are, or who could you be.
One can emulate the decadent lifestyle of Pablo Escobar by partying on his private island
with the world’s most famous models.
While this kind of experiential snobbery has certain blossomed in the last decade, the
reason WHY was described by philosopher Jean Baudrillard in 1968.
As he wrote in his work “System of Objects”: “Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology
of competition gives way to a ‘philosophy’ of self-fulfillment.
In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods,
they actualize themselves in consumption.”
[System of objects] Baudrillard was, in this case, talking about
material goods.
People like Billy McFarland need to live in a swanky penthouse and drive expensive cars
to give off the air that “Hey, I’m an important guy you should trust with millions
of dollars.”
This kind of materialism-centric society, as argued by fellow philosopher Guy Debord,
quickly transforms into a world where the image of wealth overcomes the existence of
wealth.
Billy flexing his money only mattered insofar as he put up the appearance of wealth.
As Debord said, “Being” devolves into “having.”
But something else weird happens with this- the logic of elitism tends to contradict itself.
While Fyre puts on the image of being an exclusive party for the world’s elite,
Billy admits in the documentary that the messaging is meant for some average joe
PUNCTUATION: We're selling a pipe dream to your average loser... you're average guy in
middle america.
As Baudrillard writes : [“Advertising tells us, at the same time: “buy this, for it
is like nothing else!”
(“The meat of the elite, the cigarette of the happy few! etc); but also: “Buy this
because everyone else is using it!”]
In a world where the image of wealth is more important than the wealth itself, Fyre Fest
is the perfect ticket.
If experiences are the new ways in which the rich communicate their supposed superiority,
then Fyre lets even ordinary people act like the super-rich.
If it both “is” and “isn’t" for the elite, we can also see how the experience
of something like a successful Fyre Fest or Burning Man can be labeled artificial- for
it both “is” and “isn’t” real.
Now, I know that's a bit confusing, so let me explain.
In the novel “White Noise” by Don Delillo, a family goes to visit the most photographed
barn in America.
As they approach the barn, they are saturated with images of the barn plastered on billboards,
and postcards.
One character comments, “Nobody sees the barn.
Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”..
“[they’re] not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one.
Every photograph reinforces an aura…we’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception.
A religious experience in a way, like all tourism… they’re taking pictures of taking
pictures.”
The elevated importance to which people treat the barn has nothing to do with the barn itself,
but rather the proliferation of images OF the barn.
When you visit the most photographed barn in the world, you’re not there to look at
the barn, you’re there to BE THERE- to be one of the group whose collective reverence
elevates the barn to something more than just a bunch of wood planks.
Nobody gives a shit about the barn, they care about taking part in the social aura that
deems the barn special.
Ever been to a concert where people record video of the performance instead of actually
watching the performance?
Driven to Joshua Tree just to get a profile pic?
When you do these things, you’ve stopped having an experience, and have started partaking
in an aura.
And this is the appeal of the Fyre Fest in a nutshell.
It was an event propelled entirely by a promotional video that sold an aura.
And even if the festival was a total success, the aura of the video would have mattered
more than the festival itself.
You want to go to the Fyre festival because you want to be part of maintaining the impossible
aura that was sold to you.
You would go and capture a single frame of something beautiful and post it to instagram
with a hashtag that celebrated a once in a lifetime experience.
To thinkers like Baudrillard and Delillo, it never really is about the experience.
It’s about maintaining the aura of the experience.
The experience always disappoints.
The Bahamas are hot, and full of mosquitos, and hanging around models will probably only
serve to distort your self-esteem.
But that one instagram image will obscure all those annoyances and function as a small,
but integral part in elevating the experience to the sublime promised in the video.
For Baudrillard, when we consume products, we’re not consuming say, a bar of chocolate,
we’re consuming its meaning.
And, for Baudrillard, the world has been completely overcome by this logic: the symbols of things
have completely overcome the things themselves PUNCTUATION: The promo video was perfectly
generic fantasia of what an instagram come to life would be
And as a result, the best way to be a “part” of Fyre Fest is not to have a fun time at
the festival, but to telegraph to all of your followers
how you are having fun, even (or especially) if it’s all bullshit.
We must consume the festival’s meaning, and then regurgitate that meaning for everyone
else “And there are a lot of people in the millenial
generation that are interested in experiences that are effectively like pretext for really
good instagrams” And it’s not just music festivals and barns.
Take the pop-up museum, in which a company rents a space, fills it with objects, and
deems it an “experience."
This phenomenon spawned an amazing article from writer Amanda Hess entitled “The Existential
Void of the Pop-Up Experience.”
Whether it’s the Museum of Ice Cream, The Museum of Pizza,
or the Color Factory, Hess details how the act of “learning”
becomes “mandatory fun” at the risk of ruining other people’s “good vibes”
of which they're going to pour into the composition of their perfect ball-pit selfie.
People don’t go to the museum of pizza to learn about pizza,
they just go to take pictures with a pizza-shaped guitar donated by Andrew WK, displayed in
a glass box for an extra air of importance.
The real attraction is taking part in the social media ritual that gives something significance.
As Hess writes: “The most that these spaces can offer is
the facsimile of traditional pleasures.
They take nature and art and knowledge seeking, flatten them into sight gags and stick them
to every stray surface.”
And if you consider this Fyre-themed pop-up experience in LA, which also ended abruptly,
your head just might explode.
Perhaps nothing speaks to this more than this moment in the Netflix documentary.
PUNCTUATION: “I was reading about a company in Russia that now will sell people like three
hours to do a photoshoot on a private jet that’s just parked on the tarmac.
They never actually leave, but they get to take the picture like looking out the window
and pretending they’re living this lifestyle and that they’re successful.”
For some, any vague tie to reality can be completely untethered.
It’s not the experience itself, but the image of that experience, that matters.
That’s why it’s so poetic when Fyre compeletely failed.
The symbolic order comes crashing down and we’re faced with the discrepancy between
the symbolic value and the actual value- between luxury villas
and this PUNCTUATION: my buddy pissed on a few of the
beds And that’s why this event has resonated
so much for us here at Wisecrack, aside from one man’s very relatable quest for potable
water.
PUNCTUATION: And I got to his office, fully prepared to suck his dick.
That a festival that uses something as vapid as instagram to sell itself ends up being
a complete failure functions as the perfect representation of
the nothingness that lies underneath the symbols and images we perpetuate.
Fyre is a sublime example of life hooked on aura, and the obscene, shallow reality that
lurks underneath it.