Hacker Cinema
Fyre Fraud
2019 · Film · documentary · 96 min
Directed by Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason
A true-crime comedy exploring a failed music festival turned internet meme at the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era.
5 positive2 negative10 neutralfrom 17 commenters
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17 comments on Hacker News
I'll go off topic to documentaries where the hustlers did themselves -
"Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened" was made by the Fyre Fest people.
Similarly the hilarious tech failure "Riot On!" was made by themselves. The director was a pseudonym.
A bit more on topic but meta it's interesting the US military has sent historians to current engagements since WW2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_detachment
From the interviews I've listened to it seems like people were given the impression that the mission of the company was sincere, and that Holmes was gifted at making people feel as if their concerns had been heard and making them feel like the company would be an eventual success.
The film Fyre Fraud might interest you. The subjects discuss how they felt pressured to "make it work" at Fyre Festival (a different fraud) even as they understood the window of possibility was rapidly diminishing.
My favorites on Netflix this year were:
Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 https://www.netflix.com/title/81280924
Challenger Final Flight https://www.netflix.com/title/81012137
FYRE (Festival) https://www.netflix.com/title/81035279
From a long time ago, and I don't even know if you can still watch it anywhere, but that FogBugz Aardvark'd documentary was really fun to watch too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark%27d:_12_Weeks_with_Geeks
I have a feeling a documentary will be made of this
Eg. Like Fyre
I know what you mean about The Social Network and Silicon Valley. Not tech specifically, but definitely motivating and inspiring for me are:
Moneyball Margin Call Limitless The Big Short Wolf of Wall Street That Fyre documentary and at Christmas - Trading Places
It feels like at this point one can start a boutique streaming service specifically for documentaries about scams. Just from recent years alone I can think of Alex Gibney's Theranos movie, Netflix and Hulu's Fyre Festival movies, Hulu's WeWork movie, Amazon Prime's LuLaRoe documentary, and who is Joe Exotic if not yet another entrepreneurial charlatan and egomaniac from the same cloth of Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann?
Really looking forward to the Ozy documentary.
I agree with you... I'm just saying that people should educate themselves on the symptoms and RUN if they can't manage their boundaries. If they do have someone in their life and can lure them to therapeutic thought, that is a huge net good. What worries me about the current discourse is otherizing them like rounding them up will solve the problem. Do not work for them, do not date them, but do understand that they are humans and to otherize them is an open door for an amorphous scarlet letter that is very difficult to take back when wrongly applied.
I don't have a solution. I don't think in our society, we, have a solution. To some degree the NPD person is the exemplar ubermensch of what our society is selling us. Look at the gleeful schadenfreude and two documentaries about that Fyre festival guy. He WILL run for office at some point in the future and people will eat it up. They are a race condition of that operating within the exact terms that are fed to us all day telling us to succeed at all costs in ways that keep us all fucked.
I suspect the reason to vilify the vampire is to avoid looking at what made them and the knowledge that they'll always be a predator even when they know what not to eat. There are no good options, but I know the best option isn't making personality disordered people into untouchables. For one, they'd love that. They thrive on that and can dedicate more energy to gaming that than most people can imagine. Maybe that's how we got to now. I dunno, but I'm just advocating for some sympathy for the devil even if you stay far far away from it.
For some context: fyre festival was supposed to be a high end luxury all-inclusive festival. Essentially everything in the planning -- aside perhaps from the advertising -- went poorly to the extreme. In the end all that managed to actually get arranged was the flight to the island location. Once there people more or less found themselves stranded in a tent camp with no food and too few mattresses instead of the luxury festival they were promised.
There's a couple documentaries on the whole thing which I can recommend watching, it's almost impressive how monumentally poor everything got planned. The whole thing of course strikes a chord with the ironic-fashion crowd.
I only saw the Hulu one, and I didn't remember it being very kind to fuckjerry. According to Wikipedia, Jerry Productions (aka fuckjerry) was the Netflix one. Kinda glad I didn't see it now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyre_(film)
The true Fyre Festival documentary is 10 minutes long and can be found here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBPg5ftCMv8
It's mind blowing that the agency, FuckJerry, that did the marketing for Fyre was contracted to make their own documentary about the festival. Seems like a huge conflict of interest and it shows when you watch it. I get that this isn't Frontline, just seems nuts when you think about it. Sure, let's have the same semi shady agency make their own take exonerating themselves.
Ah, so that's why I've been seeing lots of videos and posts about Fyre... I thought it was weird, as the incident was so long ago.
I had no idea Netflix had a documentary coming. I guess I was successfully targeted with undercover marketing, making it seem like this was an issue having popular discussion.
This reminds me of the Fyre documentary.
Reminds me of the Fyre documentary on Netflix and how he went back to scamming while he was on trial.
If you build a livelihood through morally corrupt means it's apparently hard to stop even after you get caught.
Not surprised to see Rodger Stone mixed up in this either while he's awaiting trial. Apparently, he knows Jeff Bezos' mistress' brother who is the prime suspect in obtaining the photos:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bezos-investigators-question-the-brother-of-his-mistress-lauren-sanchez-in-national-enquirer-leak-probe
Is the OP kidding? I just watched the Fyre Fraud documentary two days ago and it's quite clear that not only is Billy McFarland a con artist, he's a serial con artist. He started his "entrepreneurship" by hacking his school's computer to sell crayon repair services. His next venture was the Magneis credit card that promised "exclusive access" to events that it didn't have -- and went out of business. After being told many times that Fyre wasn't workable given the venue, budget, and time limitations in place, he went ahead anyway.
The most telling part of the documentary is when the interviewer asks him about all his lies. McFarland can't even admit to one of them. Ja Rule, though disclaiming responsibility, is just as guilty... and he's going to produce another festival which he claims is "similiar."
The OP says, "it's not a scam if you succeed." Who in the world would call Fyre a success? It ended without a single band performing, people having to be evacuated from the island on an emergency basis, and a $100M lawsuit. Mr. McFarland, for his part, is currently in prison for wire fraud.
It's disheartening that so many entrepreneurs today feel like defrauding people is the best way to success. Let's hope the Fyre Festival's failure acts as a lesson to some of them.
I would suggest we've been encouraging and rewarding vapidity for much longer than Instagram has been around. The problem is Instagram has sped up the feedback loop and dramatically increased the audience of such behavior.
I kinda hate most centralized forms of social media we currently have. I deleted my Facebook account a year ago, my Twitter handle 6 months ago and my Instagram account 4 months ago.
That said, I can't help but marvel at the spectacle of Instagram. There's lots of fun examples of the crazy impact Instagram has on society, but here's a couple of my favorites off the top of my head:
The two women who tried to smuggle suitcases full of cocaine into Australia, so that she could fund their glamorous Instagram-worthy lifestyles: https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/woman-documents-vacation-on-instagram-before-cocaine-bust.html
The whole Fyre festival debacle. I have only watched the Netflix documentary, and I know that it itself is flawed - given that it was produced by the same company that got the Instagram influencers to sell the Fyre scam in the first place. But actually that meta layer of craziness just gives me yet more schadenfreude :)
Influencers on any social platform rate highly on the disgusting meter as well. Even more so after recently watching the Fyre documentaries.