Fyre Festival docos expose moral bankruptcy of influencer culture

The Fyre Festival debacle exposes a culture that isn’t just vapid but dangerously corrupt. Sadly, it seems we’ve learned nothing.

A still from Netflix’s Fyre Festival doco.

It was the cheese sandwich that did it. Limp, soggy lettuce. A limpid, pale tomato. Two slices of dry bread and a synthetic slice of processed cheese. Nothing symbolised the chasm between the image and the reality of Fyre Festival better than that sandwich in its sad styrofoam tray, a tragicomic picture that shocked the world.

Attendees at the 2017 festival had been sold a vision of a Bahamian paradise — yacht parties with the Hadids and jetskiing with Ja Rule. What they got instead was a disaster — a mosquito-ridden tent city lacking basic provisions: transport, shelter, hydration. And that cheese sandwich, served because the sushi budget had been slashed at the last minute.

Fyre was the most photoshopped of festivals, selling a heavily curated image at considerable odds with reality. So how did entrepreneur Billy McFarland, the brains behind the whole affair, manage to flog this meretricious boondoggle? Simple really — he used influencers.

Vast amounts of money and effort were expended getting the world’s most revered models to promote the festival months in advance. Kendall Jenner was paid a reported $US250,000 ($353,000) to give it a boost, neglecting to use the #ad hashtag to inform her followers that it was a paid plug. Meanwhile, minor details, such as ensuring adequate plumbing and drinking water for the 5000 ticket holders, were left to the last minute.

Bella Hadid promotes the disastrous Fyre Festival

Fyre Festival has leapt back into the headlines in recent weeks because of two new rival documentaries — one from Netflix, one from Hulu in the US — that depict the debacle in painstaking detail.

This should be a moment to reflect on a tipping point, when a culture that lost its way was exposed for being not just vapid but dangerously corrupt. But influencers are still very much with us, as is their murky and corrosive business model.

The very existence of these duelling documentaries illustrates the problem. Millions of people have watched them, tutting and gasping at the lunacy of the whole enterprise. But far fewer know that Jerry Media, the agency paid to promote Fyre Festival, also helped produce the Netflix documentary. Similarly, the Hulu documentary — not available in Australia — paid McFarland a large, undisclosed sum for behind-the-scenes footage and an eight-hour interview with the man himself.

The hustle is still going.

Ja Rule and Billy McFarland.

Influencer culture gave us Fyre Festival and not much has changed since. We are still being served a daily diet of carefully disguised digital advertising, inserted into our feeds by preening narcissists who are famous merely for being ­famous. Some regulation is finally being put in place to rein in this bonanza.

Last year, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority released new guidelines for influencers, insisting that they must make it clear when their content is sponsored. Last month, a group of high-profile celebs, including Alexa Chung and Ellie Goulding, promised to change the way they promote their content.

There has been the odd rap on the knuckles for influencers who have broken the rules, but the industry is so sprawling and multifarious that meaningful ­action remains difficult.

It’s easy to rag on influencers, who generally deserve the opprobrium, but they are also just entrepreneurs cannily exploiting loopholes in a fast-evolving system. All of us who indulge in Fyre Festival schadenfreude and spend our time hoovering up snide take-downs online are also part of the problem.

Because a hate follow is still a follow; bad publicity is still publicity; and the eyeballs of an angry or ironic viewer can be sold to advertisers for the same price as that of a dupe.

In the attention economy we live in today, the only way to truly turn off the faucet is for us all to stop looking. Starting now.

Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened is streaming on Netflix.