Vanity Fair: For many voracious observers of social media, and some depressed news consumers agonizing through Donald Trump’s first 100 days, the fiasco unfolding around the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas may have been something of a surprise. The festival, which Fyre promoters had marketed on Instagram as the next Coachella, didn’t quite turn out to be the opulent Bahamas getaway, as promised, with yachts and luxury cabanas, celebrity-chef catering, and the greatest live-music entertainment that anyone had ever imagined. Instead, it was more like Lord of the Flies dystopia meets social-media hysteria, circa 2017. The luxury cabanas appeared to be disaster-relief tents. There were no lights. The lavish spread turned out to be a couple of wedges of whole-wheat bread, school-cafeteria-styled sliced cheese, and other accoutrement that appeared picked from a garbage.
2 comments:
It all reads like a bad joke. The slides are full of words that mean absolutely nothing but sound good and sound powerful on paper. The photos that the "Fyre Starters" posted could have been anywhere, and were obviously not at the festival as it hadn't been set up yet. I just don't really understand how everyone fell for it. I would understand if the tickets maxed out int he hundreds of dollars instead of the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who even has that much money to blow on a music festival? And why would you? I just really don't understand. I also don't understand how word didn't get out sooner that this was a disaster before it became actually dangerous for the people on the island. I read an article about someone working on organizing the festival who quit because they saw it falling apart before their eyes, others left too and some were fired. How did none of them let it leak that Fyre festival was going to be a hot mess? Or did they and people were too busy looking at pretty staged photos to notice?
While this article is very informative, it also takes a colloquial tone that takes away from its credibility. The added “(ugh)”’s and other comments in parentheses are generally unneeded and just make the author seem biased. However, several good points were made, such as the fact that the political sphere could be affecting (or drawing attention to) the advertising industry. I had never thought about the ways in which Trump could be affecting advertising by making lying the “norm”, and I wonder if he has “normalized” lying or simply made it more evident. Sometimes I think he just made it more evident because his lies are so easy to spot, they are very easy to highlight and contest. I also find it remarkable that such an incident like the Fyre Festival could have happened – though the author mentions a few times that the slide deck was somewhat sketchy, I did not see him ever go into why. The images and descriptions he had about “Fyre Starters” were so filled with his own commentary that I had a hard time figuring out what he was trying to say; instead, I came away with a good idea of how disgusted he feels.
Post a Comment