Why FYRE Was Never Real – Wisecrack Vlog

What's up guys? Jared here with our third Wisecrack

vlog

. The internet has been on fire revisiting the complete shitshow that was the 2017 Fyre festival ever since two documentaries were released on Hulu and Netflix. People can't seem to stop thinking about it, and I don't think it's simply because we can't take our eyes off a derailing train. Fyre Festival is the perfect symbol of many 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 group of the most popular Instagram influencers to appear on A promotional video that promises a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The problem is that this festival had no chance of taking place. They promised an exclusive island once owned by Pablo Escobar. They were given the backyard of a Sandals resort. They were promised luxury accommodation. They were given wet mattresses in overcrowded FEMA tents and a cruel interpretation of Meatless Monday. They were promised nights of modeling, drinking and dancing while listening to a legendary poster. They spent a night locked in the airport in the Bahamas, hungover and hungry. It turns out that Billy has been defrauding investors all this time and is sentenced to 6 years behind bars. People have criticized this event from all angles: whether it's the absurdity of Silicon Valley Hustle culture, Billy's apparent sociopathy, or FuckJerry's dubious role in all of this, there's certainly no shortage of digital ink spilled at Fyre Festival.

But rather than thinking of Fyre Fest as a strange 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 and curated experience from the minds at Wisecrack as we take in an exclusive experience. journey into the bowels of Fyre Fest. Let's start talking about the rich and powerful. Since the founding of the monarchy, and the nobility in general, people have flaunted their status with objects. We have unearthed prehistoric tombs adorned with ancient jewels: precious metals, jewels and ceramics. Even with the decline of the nobility in places like Europe, nothing much changed.

Their upstart “new money” merchants tried to emulate the old rich by wearing the same clothes and owning the same shit. Fast forward to today, where young people often, at least in part, reject this logic. It's not that people no longer want nice cars or clothes, but that younger generations have placed a new importance on “experiences.” And don't get me wrong, this is great. There's evidence that says you'll be happier spending a thousand dollars 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 amidst this generally positive trend, something dark has emerged. The experiences themselves have become false. Enter: Fyre Fest. Fyre Festival is the quintessential experience for selling to rich people... I mean, uh, SCORE: rich people. It is 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 you could be. One can emulate Pablo Escobar's decadent lifestyle by partying on his private island with the world's most famous models. While this type of experiential snobbery has certainly flourished in the last decade, the reason WHY was described by philosopher Jean Baudrillard in 1968.

As he wrote in his work “System of Objects”: “Today, in fact, in all parts, the ideology of competition gives way to a "philosophy" of self-

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ization. In a more integrated society, individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, but rather update themselves in consumption.” Baudrillard was speaking, in this case, of material goods. People like Billy McFarland need to live in a fancy penthouse and drive expensive cars to convey that "Hey, I'm a big guy you should trust with millions of dollars." This type of society centered on materialism, as fellow philosopher Guy Debord argues, is rapidly transforming into a world where the image of wealth surpasses the existence of wealth.

That Billy showed off his money only mattered to the extent that he appeared wealthy. As Debord said, “being” becomes “having.” But something stranger happens with this: the logic of elitism tends to contradict itself. While Fyre comes across as a party exclusive to the world's elite, Billy admits in the documentary that the message is intended for the average guy. SCORE: We're selling a pipe dream to an average loser... you're average. boy in central america. As Baudrillard writes: [“Advertising tells us, at the same time: “buy this, because it is unlike any other!” (“The meat of the elite, the cigarette of a 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 the rich communicate their supposed superiority, then Fyre allows even ordinary people to act like the super-rich. If "is" and "is not" for the elite, we can also see how the experience of something like a successful Fyre Fest or Burning Man can be labeled as artificial, as it "is" and "is not."

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. Now, I know it's a little confusing, so let me explain. In the novel “White Noise” by Don Delillo, a family goes to visit the most photographed barn in the United States. As they approach the barn, they are saturated with images. from the barn plastered on billboards and postcards.

One character comments: "No one sees the barn once you've seen the signs on the barn, it's impossible to see the barn"... "I'm not here to capture a picture." We are here to maintain one. Each photograph reinforces an aura... we have agreed to be part of a collective perception. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism… they are taking photographs of taking photographs.” The high importance that people place on the barn has nothing to do with the barn itself, but rather with the proliferation of images OF THE barn. When you visit the most photographed barn in the world, you're not there to look at it. you are there to BE THERE, to be one of the group whose collective reverence elevates the barn to something more than just a pile of wooden planks.

Nobody gives a shit about the barn, they care about participating in the social aura that considers it. Have you ever been to a concert where people record a video of the performance instead of actually watching it? Have you been to Joshua Tree just to get a profile picture? When you do these things, you stop having an experience and began to participate in an aura. And this is the appeal of Fyre Fest in a nutshell. It was an event driven entirely by a promotional video that sold an aura. And although the festival was a total success, the aura of the video.

They have mattered more than the festival itself. You want to go to the Fyre festival because you want to be a part of maintaining the impossible aura they sold you. You would go and capture a single frame of something beautiful and post it on Instagram with a hashtag celebrating a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For thinkers like Baudrillard and Delillo, it's

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really about the experience. It's about maintaining the aura of the experience. The experience always disappoints. The Bahamas are hot and full of mosquitoes, and hanging out with models will probably only serve to distort your self-esteem. But that Instagram image will obscure all of those annoyances and serve as a small but integral part of elevating the experience to the sublime promised in the video.

For Baudrillard, when we consume products, we do not consume, say, a bar of chocolate, we consume its meaning. And, for Baudrillard, the world has been completely surpassed by this logic: the symbols of things have completely surpassed the things themselves SCORE: The promotional video was a perfectly generic fantasy of what an Instagram come true would be. And as it turns out, the best way to be “part” of Fyre Fest is not to have a fun time at the festival, but to telegraph to all your followers how much fun you're having, even (or especially) if everything sucks. We must consume the meaning of the festival and then regurgitate that meaning for everyone else. "And there are a lot of people in the millennial generation who are interested in experiences that are effectively a pretext for really good Instagrams." And it's not just about music festivals and barns. .

Take the pop-up museum, where a company rents a space, fills it with objects, and calls it an “experience.” This phenomenon spawned a surprising article by writer Amanda Hess titled “The Existential Void of Emergent Experience.” "Whether it's the Ice Cream Museum, the Pizza Museum or the Color Factory, Hess details how the act of “learning” becomes “mandatory fun” at the risk of ruining the “good vibes” of other people who go to enjoy. pour into the composition of your perfect ball pit selfie. People don't go to the pizza museum 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 participating in the social media ritual that gives some meaning. As Hess writes: “The most these spaces can offer is the facsimile of traditional pleasures. to turn them into visual devices and stick them on every stray surface.” And if you consider this Fyre-themed pop-up experience in Los Angeles, which also ended abruptly, your head might explode. Perhaps nothing speaks to this more than this moment in the documentary. from Netflix PUNCTUATION: “I was reading about a company in. Russia now sells people three hours to do a photo shoot on a private jet that is parked on the tarmac.

They

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actually leave, but they can take the photo as if they are looking out the window and pretend they are living this lifestyle. May they be successful.” For some, any vague link to reality may become completely disconnected. It is not the experience itself, but the image of that experience that matters. That's why it's so poetic when Fyre completely fails. The symbolic order collapses and we confront each other. with the discrepancy between symbolic value and real value, between luxury villas and this SCORE: my friend urinated on some 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. by drinking water SCORE: And I arrived at his office fully prepared to suck his cock.

That a festival that uses something as insipid as Instagram to sell itself ends up being a complete failure works as the perfect representation of the nothingness underneath. The symbols and images that we perpetuate are a sublime example of a life hooked on the aura and the obscene and superficial reality that hides beneath it.