And drawing lessons from them is also nothing new. WaPo reviews not one, but two documentaries concerning the cleverness of two con-men, and the folly of those they conned, through the instrumentality of something called Fyre Festival:
The notorious Fyre Festival was promoted as an elite concert event in the Bahamas, promising its attendees beachside villas, top-notch cuisine and nonstop partying with celebrities and social-network influencers on sandy beaches over two weekends in the spring of 2017.
Instead, as most everyone knows, Fyre was a disaster, becoming Instagram infamous for serving up “a tsunami of Schadenfreude,” as one observer puts it. Most of Fyre’s selfie-obsessed attendees, who’d paid thousands of dollars to attend, were stranded on a gravel spit with little food, water or shelter, and worst of all, spotty Internet access. Their suffering was exquisite and, admittedly, a fine comeuppance. “White people love camping,” joked “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah when news broke of the festival’s utter failure. “Unless it’s a surprise.”
Now, for reasons that easily dovetail with the same anxieties and lessons of the Fyre debacle, there are two competing documentaries out this week on streaming TV. The first, released in a hurry Monday on Hulu, is co-directors Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst’s “Fyre Fraud”; the second, premiering Friday on Netflix, is director Chris Smith’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.”
Funny thing is, it’s just one of the oldest stories in the world, isn’t it? I’m reminded of the religious scammers who’ve operated from time immemorial, out of the most staid of orthodox churches to the Last Days folks to tent revivalists.
Image credit: FIBERSHED
While the shearers, the con-artists who operated at Fyre Festival and operate at tent revival meetings, have more or less the same goal in mind, collecting money and leaving the marks to their own devices, I think the sheep also share a connection: a desire to belong that has exceeded reasonable bounds. I’ve never had much interest in the celebrity culture which has been rampant for 50 or more years; I treat it as trivia, I might know a little bit and I might not. I don’t really understand that drive to be part of celebrity culture.
But the folks attending Fyre just had to have their celebrity fix, as if it means much. I have friends who treasure their chance encounters with celebrity, such as one who happened to encounter Cary Grant as Grant exited a limo; even I have a story which amuses me, which is hitting up the then-new Byerly’s, a sort of upper-end grocery store chain, in Chanhassen, MN, at some ungodly hour of the night, and walking past what appeared to be a startled Prince and lady friend. Or perhaps they weren’t. I just nodded and kept on going. Such is the life of the focused hacker.
Back to the point, though, those encounters were not pursued, and speak more to the power of chance than anything else, and ultimately to our shared humanity. I mean, a grocery store? Come on!
But the Fyre Festival attendees? Eager to attain their own trivial celebrity, they paid their shillings, looked forward to rubbing shoulders with actors or singers or podcasters or YouTubers, or, what’s popular today, maybe entrepreneurs? And were humiliated. They pursued the central motivating force of celebrity culture beyond all reasonable boundary and … clip-clip.
I think a parallel case can be made for those caught and sheared by the snips of religion. As an agnostic, I do not dispute that religion brings a number of positives to human life, mixed as they can be with the negatives which do accompany religion. But when folks are so obsessed with touching the divine, for that assurance that what they’re doing is, rather than right, but instead divinely blessed, even to the point where they share in the divine being, participate in miracles, etc.
And, given credulity, brain plasticity, and the cleverness of con-men, it’s not all that hard to do.
In the end, the two groups just aren’t that different – pursuing the central core of their cultures with such single-mindedness as to discard all common sense. All, perhaps, to escape the essential ennui they may fear to encounter in their lives.
