The Netflix and Hulu Fyre Festival Documentaries Are Horror Stories About the Tech Industry

There’s a detail about Fyre Festival organizer Billy McFarland that comes up in Fyre Fraud, the Hulu documentary about the catastrophic 2017 event, that's particularly indelible. McFarland, who appears in the Hulu doc, recounts how when he was in second grade, he started his first “business” by telling a classmate he could fix her broken crayon for a dollar. He then hacks into the school’s computers, programming them to advertise his crayon business. At that point in his life, the adults around him used this ingenuity as proof that he was destined for great things, or as his mother put it in a letter testifying to his character when he was arrested for wire fraud, that he was doomed to “think big.”

No one told McFarland that charging a fellow student for something the teacher would have done for free was unfair. No one encouraged him to help another 7-year-old because helping our friends is nice and good. Instead, McFarland walked away from elementary school with the message that he was smarter than other kids, better than other kids, for finding ways to take their money for no reason.

I remember the first time I saw the cold cheese sandwich that nailed the event's coffin. Fyre Festival was billed as a luxury music/vacation/Instagram experience that would blow Coachella out of the water. It promised artists like Blink-182 and Major Lazer performing in the Bahamas, where guests would “glamp” (or stay in VIP villas), and was promoted by models and Instagram influencers like Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner. Day tickets started at $500, not including airfare, with some villas going for over $40,000. But the weekend was a disaster, with guests arriving to shoddy tents, no music, and the aforementioned cold cheese sandwiches instead of the luxury housing, food and entertainment they thought they paid for. Now, McFarland is serving six years in prison.

Billy McFarland

Frye Fraud

Billy McFarland
The Cinemart/Hulu

This week, two streaming sites dropped competing documentaries about the fiasco, with Hulu's Fyre Fraud arriving early and accusing Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened of being compromised, as it was produced by Jerry Media and Matte Projects, two companies that were involved in marketing and organizing the festival. It certainly encourages thoughts of conspiracy. Is it really so nuts to think that, even if they wanted Fyre to succeed, they knew they’d be able to milk the publicity when they failed? However, Netflix claims that Hulu paid McFarland a considerable sum ($250,000, though Hulu denies it was that much) to appear in their doc. Both narratives seem tainted at best.

Fyre Fraud takes its main aim at McFarland himself, and offers up a lot of business details, whether it’s Jerry Media advertising the event before there was even a confirmed space, or McFarland lying about how many users his previous business had. And though timelines and motives get confusing sometimes, there’s no shortage of juicy details, like Fyre Festival choosing a weekend during which there was already a popular regatta taking place, so all the hotels were booked! Like a blatant disregard for toilets because if “no one is eating then no one is pooping” (we're not making this up)! Like the classic amassing of VC funding based on inflated numbers! By the time Hulu juxtaposes McFarland saying he hasn’t lied on tape with all the lies he has just told, you’re convinced his scamming is pathological.

The Hulu doc also attempts to dissect the millennial culture that allowed Fyre Festival to get as far as it did. Where it fails is when the talking heads chalk it all up to millennials being narcissists who love their selfies, or to this all being a case of rich people problems. It's not that both aren’t true, but it’s just too easy to joke that anyone paying thousands of dollars to see Blink-182 in 2017 got whatever was coming to them.

The most insightful analysis as to why you would do that comes during a talking head with Jia Tolentino of the New Yorker, who notes that “Millennials's understanding of the world has been shaped by extreme precarity.” Between 9/11, endless war, and an economic recession, millennials are a generation hyper-aware of the impermanence of things other generations may have taken for granted—houses, jobs, Social Security. That may be why we’re more likely to seek out “experiences.” After all, the IRS can’t repossess your trip to Burning Man in 2016. That doesn't even take social media into account, which has certainly been able to weaponize FOMO, because now you’re aware of every party that happens without you. But it’s naive to think Boomers wouldn’t have been just as obsessed if Instagram had been around when they were 20.

<cite class="credit">Netflix</cite>
Netflix

Netflix's option, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, is less about millennial culture and more a step-by-step breakdown of every horrible thing that went wrong and every bad choice that was made, which makes for a documentary narrower in scope but possibly better at unraveling this nightmare.

It begins five months out, with McFarland and Ja Rule framed as equal business partners, not as one psycho mastermind and one hapless celebrity. They’re building an app, called Fyre, that will be used to book exclusive talent. They decide to plan a festival to promote the app. Then a billion ridiculous things happen. McFarland claims he has bought Pablo Escobar’s old island. He hasn’t, but the real owner says he can use it as long as he doesn’t mention Escobar, as they want to rehabilitate the Bahamas's image. McFarland immediately name drops Escobar in promos, and loses access to the island. All the while, they’re shooting promos for something that doesn’t exist yet, andMcFarland is taking out ridiculous loans, promising money left and right, but its nowhere to be found.

Fyre also has perhaps the most absurd and illuminating detail of the docs, which I will spoil here, because I need to talk about it. Netflix introduces us to Andy King, a salt-and-pepper event planner who had known McFarland since he was in college. A day before the festival was set to launch, Bahamas customs agents allegedly were holding back four trucks full of Evian water, refusing to release them unless Fyre paid import taxes, because you need to pay things like import taxes. According to King, McFarland called him asked him to go to customs and SUCK A CUSTOMS OFFICER'S DICK to fix the water problem, because King was gay. And King says he was going to do it! But the head of customs said he just wanted to be paid the import fee! The absurdity of not only suggesting an employee should do this, but being convinced that a) the customs officer wants this and b) it will get him to release the water means I will never get over this. I will think about it until the day I die.

Perhaps the most important part of Netflix's doc is its acknowledgment of the real victims. They aren’t just the wealthy, largely white influencers who lost thousands on a party weekend. It was the hundreds of Bahamians who had been working on this event for months who never got paid. Apparently there is still a quarter of a million dollars in day wages owed to the laborers who cleared roads, built tents, and tried to organize the infrastructure for the festival. The Bahamas had a 12.57% unemployment rate in 2017, almost three times the rate of the U.S. While ticket-holders might be refunded, it's up in the air as to whether the day laborers will ever see their money. That's the rot of the modern tech industry. Rich people make greedy decisions that doom those beneath them, and they get to keep on walking. How many times has a CEO made a bad choice that results in layoffs while he keeps his job? How many businesses have been built on illegal labor? How many times does this have to happen before the right people are punished?

McFarland is rare in that he's actually in jail right now, serving six years for trying to run yet another scam while out on bail for charges about Fyre Festival. But I’m still afraid that someone will walk away from these documentaries, more likely Fyre Fraud, with the idea that McFarland is a maverick genius who just bit off more than he could chew. Both feature plenty of people calling him a delusional, pathological liar, but in Fyre Fraud he gets to be the fast-talking charmer that got everyone to sign on with him in the first place. And as we already know from the state of tech today, investors are willing to overlook a lot if they think it’ll make them money. As long as we live under capitalism, it doesn't matter that McFarland is in jail. There will always be another McFarland to take his place.