The Fyre Festival Social Media Study
T he psychology of the con artist is such, say those who written report them, that the very best fraudsters are able to canvas through prevarication-detector tests because they don't believe themselves to exist lying. This fact came to light in Fyre Fraud, ane of two documentaries released this week about the 2017 Fyre music festival, a fiasco that traumatised hundreds of social media influencers and for which organiser Billy McFarland is serving a six-year prison sentence. What'due south fascinating nearly the story, as told in both the Netflix and Hulu shows, is how deeply McFarland tapped into the self-deception of his targets, and how the companies that enabled him continue to thrive.
The art of the con feels like the great expression of our historic period and McFarland – a grifter who, also every bit having the brainwave to put on a music festival in the Bahamas, ran a credit card visitor and sold fraudulent tickets to exclusive events – is the sort of vapid buffoon whose naked untrustworthiness is so undisguised as to brand him seem almost transparent.
His downfall, and the defrauding of millennials with more coin than sense, was considered deeply satisfying at the fourth dimension and continues to be so in the retelling – peculiarly the part played past Kendall Jenner and her imitators, all of whom heavily promoted a festival that, when partygoers turned up in the Commonwealth of the bahamas, was discovered to be a tent metropolis with no catering and no music lineup.
It is the role played by Instagram that continues to interest. All advertising is premised on the selling of an ideal but the efficiency with which social influencers inculcate inadequacy in their followers, then sell them products and experiences to fix their sad picayune lives, is creepier than anything that predates it and feels like the greater charade behind McFarland's hustle.
On social media, people whose income derives from promoting a fantasy version of their lives were persuaded past McFarland to endorse the festival. It's a strange thing nearly the electric current celebrity landscape that while consumers accept become more sophisticated – no one who watches Keeping Up With the Kardashians is under any illusion that it is spontaneous, nor that the Kardashians are a happy family – the same voodoo still works on them time and again.
It's a dynamic that makes sense, in a manner. While traditional advertising is at a remove from everyday life, a personal photostream in which every shot is carefully curated has an "integrity" that broader branding tin can't reach. In this scenario, the enjoyment of an experience is secondary to that of selling of information technology down the chain to ane's own followers, with the subsequent admiration and green-eyed it's hoped to cause.
It doesn't matter if the feel is false, nor if the artifice is fully on testify. All that matters, as someone as unlikely as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez observed on Twitter recently, is that "the brand is so potent". McFarland's festival failed, simply the delusion underpinning information technology rages on unabated.
Comments
Post a Comment