Billy MacFarland: The Black Card & Fyre Festival Scammer

quote:

---

It’s hard to think of any disaster more simultaneously hilarious and terrible than Fyre Festival, the 2017 “Woodstock for millennials” that turned out to be more like The Hunger Games: Influencers Edition. On the one hand, there were delightful doses of Schadenfreude ripe for the picking: images of rich people scrambling to hoard wet mattresses and crying over the cold cheese and plain bread that replaced the gourmet cuisine they had been promised when they spent obscene amounts of money on tickets. But there was a darker side to the story: hundreds of local contractors in the Bahamas, where the event was held, were completely ripped off after the festival dissolved into a catastrophe. Fyre co-founder Billy McFarland abandoned them without payment for months of labor when the whole thing went haywire.

---

quote:

---

So while it was obviously easy fodder for Twitter jokes, the Fyre Festival saga also has plenty to do with class divides, the justice system, and, yes, the ways in which in which social-media obsession has led some people to prioritize image over reality—even when doing so comes at a steep psychological price.

---