This conversation is lifted from the episode entitled “The Fyre Festival That Never Was” on the Millennial Edition podcast (@MillennialEdit1).
So as many of you have probably now seen, both Hulu and Netflix released their documentaries on the Fyre Festival. If you have not been able to see them yet please check both of them out, they are simply riveting! Strangely enough, they do not feel redundant because they both attack the fraud from different angles, so watching them both will give you a full picture about the overhyped festival that never was.
But what intrigued me about the documentaries is that they both were a clear and, frankly, well-deserved indictment on the Millennial generation, and I wanted to delve into this discussion a little bit more.
So as a refresher for those who have never heard of the Fyre Festival saga or have not seen the documentaries yet, let me give you a quick rundown of what happened. Billy McFarland is a young Millennial Ponzi-Schemer who had several failed businesses, but develops in partnership with rapper Ja Rule what will be the most exclusive and luxurious music festival held on a private island in the Bahamas once owned by Pablo Escobar. But as the story goes, the festival was built entirely on a pipe dream pushed by social media influencers, and ended up defrauding both participants and investors alike since as was discovered, they had no money, infrastructure, and talent to pull off an event of that magnitude. Once festival goers arrived at the festival, they found a desolate, unprepared place filled with chaos and nasty cheese sandwiches. This was all after paying thousands of dollars for what they thought would be time frolicking on sandy beaches with beautiful models and influencers, living in luxury tents, and rubbing shoulders with the greatest musicians of our generation. Well, needless to say, the jig is up and now Billy McFarland is sitting behind bars to serve 6 years for fraud and will have to pay $26 million in restitution to his victims.
So like I said before, the thing that most stuck out to me in these documentaries was its effects on the Millennial generation. All of Billy’s businesses prior, and unfortunately, after the failed Fyre Festival preyed on what is broken within us in the Millennial generation. It is clearly broken within him as well, and it is the need for him to sell people a façade of a life that is greater than the reality of the life he currently has. The viral commercial that was developed to sell the festival originally on social media, demonstrated just that. You know, the unattainable ideal of partying with beautiful supermodels, lavish parties with expensive alcohol, all on a luxurious island with white sand and blue-green water. I believe it was in the Netflix documentary that Billy says on camera in a strategy meeting that he is “selling a pipe dream to your average loser in middle America.” Now, that should have set off alarm bells to the people who were working with him because he literally says what his true intentions are. Perhaps it is because deep down inside that is how Billy truly sees himself. But more importantly, he knows that in the Millennial generation that is how a lot of us see ourselves. So I just want to stop right here and have a moment of reflection on that. If we get nothing else out of this scandal, we really need to ask ourselves: ‘Why are we chasing Billy’s ideal for how our lives are supposed to look? Why is this the ideal?’ I mean, I love luxury and fun in the sun with beautiful people, while rubbing shoulders with celebrities just like the next person. But if that ideal never happens, I am content with the life I have now. I feel like it is enough. Maybe we need to ask ourselves why we feel the lives we are living are not enough. Who told us they were not?
It is pretty clear from the start of this pipe dream that Billy wanted the trappings of fame more than he wanted this festival. Now perhaps this is an unpopular opinion, but the idea of the Fyre Festival (a luxury music festival on a beautiful island) is a great idea when you think about it. I probably would not attend, but I think that there are a good number of Millennials that probably would like to experience an awesome music festival with celebrities and influencers on an exclusive island. And if Billy or anyone on his team were good with management and money, and were realistic with expectations for its true cost and time commitment, perhaps they could have pulled it off. But since he wasn’t, and he would spend investor money frivolously, his desperation for celebrity and fame became his downfall.
But it is important to point out that Billy had help. He could not have conducted a fraud of this magnitude alone. What I find so interesting about this fraud is how many investors were willing to give him money. Billy had several failed businesses prior to this festival. But because he is a fast-talking white male who knew celebrities and social media influencers, companies were handing over millions of dollars of their own money. Think about how hard it is for women and minorities to get that level of seed funding for any of their projects. I heard a statistic that the chances are 1% or less. But like most white males, they can get large-scale investments purely on their dreams or visions, while women and minorities have to jump through hoops for a fraction of what Billy was given and ended up squandering.
Another factor that aided Billy’s fraud was social media. He obviously knew to use social media to lure vulnerable Millennials into buying into his fraud. Now I think social media is an awesome tool to connect people everywhere at anytime so that we can spread and share information, so my critique is not on social media itself, but more on how Millennials are using it. Because what Billy knew about social media that our generation knows about social media, is that you can create whatever image of the life you want people to believe you live through photos or videos, whether it is true or not. And our generation is guilty of being caught up in this. And if we are being fully honest with ourselves, a lot of us do this to show the world or get validation that our lives matter and that we are amazing people worthy of getting to know. Somewhere within all of us we have Billy’s brokenness (definitely not his fraudulent, Ponzi-scheming ways) and that is what made our generation vulnerable to Billy. We have to all admit it. We will carry on the façade and sell people the luxuries of our lives, whether it be true or not. Whether we took the time and hard work to create it or not. Because we hope that this façade will make people want to be us. On our social media platforms, it will make people want to follow us. Which translates overall into, that it will make people love us. At least in our minds it is love, and who wouldn’t want that? Even if it is only 5 minutes of fame, it is 5 minutes of someone knowing you are alive and that you matter. 5 minutes of not living in obscurity. 5 minutes away from the loneliness and pain of our lives. 5 minutes away from our jobs sucking and the bills we can’t pay and frankly: Who wouldn’t be driven by that? But the unfortunate truth about this façade and what it is built on is that it is never going to sustain us as a generation, and it will eventually all come crashing down- like the Fyre Festival. What is built on a façade will eventually be found out to be a façade, because you cannot keep the lie going on forever.
I think that these documentaries about the Fyre Festival should serve as a wake-up call to the Millennial generation, because there are so many things that make our generation amazing. But if we do not evaluate and fix what is broken about us, it really will destroy us because we will always be vulnerable to sociopathic Ponzi-Schemers like Billy who will exploit us if we don’t. Billy is neither sorry for what he did and will never be done inventing new ways to scam our generation. I think one really great outcome of the fraudulent festival (besides Billy being behind bars) is that the FTC or the Federal Trade Commission realized that they needed greater oversight over social media influencers who are now required to demonstrate “truth-in-advertising”. This means that whatever social media influencers advertise in a post, they need to indicate they are paid to advertise it, and the post must be “truthful” and not misleading, or they could face lawsuits. But just remember, they advertise a life that they believe we would feel we are missing out on. Perhaps this means we need to evaluate our own lives, and why the lives we live are not enough.
