For everyone who hates the "plug-and-play" trips to Burning Man set up for rich kids, this story is the schadenfreude of the year. It turns out that the logistics of throwing giant festivals in remote locations are difficult! Who would have guessed?
I look forward to the deeper investigative reporting on precisely how that mess worked out as badly as it did, but the combination of promise-vs-reality mismatch and the rough PR afterwards suggests incompetence on all levels.
I don't have the link handy but one of the people tasked with artist relations posted about how it was basically not happening 6 weeks ago when he quit. He mentioned they were so incompetent that they didn't even make him sign an NDA.
I know someone on one of the booking agencies involved. They insisted that all the DJ's get paid up front. So they basically all got a free vacation to Miami.
"It turns out that the logistics of throwing giant festivals in remote locations are difficult!"
I agree with your statement, but I'm not even sure it applies here. The organizers were charging up to $400,000 a ticket (!) including promises of chartered planes and geodesic domes. They provided none of it, the location is described as "dangerous", and it appears no performers showed up. But they did provide some sort of commercial flights back, which probably cost about $199 each. Sounds like a profitable scheme, particularly if the organizers are basically unknown and now simple disappear with the cash.
As someone who has been to the Exumas, you're talking about small, non-volcanic populated Bahamian islands.
I doubt the infrastructure was up to the standards of the club scene, but it's not like there aren't medical facilities, food, or water on Great Exuma.
Even dropping a larger number of festival attenders (on an island with a normal population of 7,000), we're talking "dangerous" conditions in terms of "there's no air conditioned room for me to wait in" and "why hasn't anyone offered me champagne and caviar yet"?
These kids need to learn to appreciate the beauty around them (it's an absolutely gorgeous place) and quit bitching that they don't have everything handed to them on a silver spoon.
Or in other words, try traveling instead of being a tourist.
Getting thousands of unprepared people on an island with a limited food supply, not enough lodging and inadequate security is very dangerous. These are the ideal conditions to cause panic.
In fact the article mentions that some the partygoers were all like "fuck that shit and let's just have fun" but changed their mind after assessing the situation.
It's the Bahamas. I've never been on an island where the local fishing industry (incl neighboring islands) couldn't easily scale to feed a few thousand. Demand rather than supply limited. And the locals are likely happily selling fresh catch to tourists at $75 / fish.
Lodging, sleep on the beach for a couple nights. This time of year, 80s every day. 70s every night.
Security? If the security problem is the tourists themselves, then maybe they don't deserve to spend time in paradise.
> "At first, she and her friends wanted to make the best of a bad situation, she said, "but then we saw how it started getting dangerous." She said the site didn't have enough security, lights, or food.
> "You were promised chargers for your phone — did not get that," Busier said. "You were promised food — we were like starving. And you were promised safety, you were promised to be taken care of, you were promised an experience of a lifetime. And yes, it was quite the experience, but not in a positive way."
I recognize that the article is somewhat of a hit piece. But if the above is the attendees making the best of a bad situation, then I expressed about as much sympathy as I have.
Article has an obvious slant, but as someone who's been to the area I'd agree that anyone who can't enjoy being there is too first world needy and/or lacks imagination.
It does have the look of a scam to steal the money. I mean if they were in any way decent you'd think they'd have shipped food and some of the other stuff they promised.
They've already stated they're refunding everyone and providing VIP passes to next year's event (doubt that last bit will happen). As for 'disappearing' one of the organizers is Ja Rule a very well known hip-hop artist so unlikely.
If you think Ja Rule won't just let the business entity declare bankruptcy while he continues to tweet "NOT MY FAULT" because he used to have hits (the last time he charted was 2004), you are very naive.
It seems very unlikely that everyone who paid will get their money back. Ironically, it's probably the people that paid the most/have the most "influence" will be reimbursed the fastest (if at all), because the "organizers" were most assuredly obsessed with status. The people that paid the least/have the least will almost definitely be the most screwed. They were asking people to sign pieces of paper for refunds. Come on.
The co-founder of the event has a history of over-promising and under-delivering [1], Ja Rule hasn't had a hit in 13 years and is irrelevant, and the only people that probably got paid upfront were the models [2] that posted on Instagram but were then warned not to come to Miami [3].
Other than a dig at '"plug-and-play" trips to Burning Man' which is a tired point that point of fact have always been part of Burning Man more so than the people now who are going to be cool and not liking it, not sure of the point?
As you say it's schadenfreude, nothing at all to be proud of?
True it's an emotion that we all have, don't deny it, but to revel in the failure of things is pretty negative.
'deeper investigative reporting' is just people fucked up big time. There is nothing to learn at this level, you/we are just loving schadenfreude is what's really going on.
"... those who met with the organisers of the Fyre Festival shared that the timeframe was far too short for such an ambitious event ... organisers were again advised to reschedule the event to avoid competing with the famous 60 and more-year-old George Town regatta ... this Regatta is the highlight of the George Town social calendar. All hotel rooms, transportation, taxis and majority of the rental houses are booked years in advance for this week. Clearly, this would pose a logistical nightmare and preclude any additional tourists or locals from attending such an event as Fyre Festival."
The Reddit dedicated to this showed there was an article in the huffpo and a Twitter account (something like @fyrefraud) that have been screaming for months that this festival was an obvious scam. If you know what to look for, a lot of outcomes are not some giant mystery. In isolation, human behavior is actually quite predictable; only in the aggregate does it get difficult to predict.
Edit: I went through my browser history and the Twitter handle is correct.the article was actually on BuzzFeed but it's been scrubbed since last night. The author's name is Madeline Scott and the title started with "is fyre festival the next big music event or..." Maybe there's a cahe of the article somewhere?
I really doubt they're blocking it saying it's dodgy, more likely that it's a way to get around other blocks - do you have the "content filter" (Government censorship) enabled?
Or, y'know, disable your filter. Sky's configuration panel is here - https://broadbandshield.sky.com/ - O2's, iirc, requires you to go to an O2 shop with your ID.
Heh, small world. I work for Sky, and my team very recently took over technical responsibility for that exact site. Nevertheless, it's worth knowing that outside the big 4, there are ISPs which on principle don't even require that step. People can fall into the trap of believing that all UK consumer internet access has a ThinkOfTheChildren filter in place by default, but that's just not true.
Sure, AAISP don't even provide a filter iirc, though are a lot more expensive than some of the more mainstream ISPs. I think Zen Internet don't either, but again, expensive.
Copied and pasted the quote into Google, with quotation marks. It was on the front page but not the top result. Wayback Machine has it too, but this archive.is (A site I've never used before) is a much higher quality archive.
From what I gather, the founders were plowing ahead despite clear signs of failure in store. Looking at it that way, this is not a scam, but instead a story of the less glamorous side of entrepreneurship. It's unfortunate that a proper learning lesson has been turned into a laughing stock, but I guess that is also part of the lesson.
>> In isolation, human behavior is actually quite predictable; only in the aggregate does it get difficult to predict.
It's the opposite, isn't it? You can predict what a group of people will do on average, but you can't know whether a specific person picked out of that group will be average, or an outlier.
No, its neither. Or both. Whatever. That is, there are fairly narrow circumstances where, with sufficient information about an individual, individual behavior is well predictable and fairly narrow circumstances where group behavior is predictable, but neither is actually all that predictable reliably (there's lots of people trying to do both, and the notable successes -- which involve lots of luck -- can make it look like either is more reliably predictable than it is.)
Each year there is guaranteed to be a 'winter wonderland' event with Santa, the Elves and everything else Christmas, only for it to go the way of the Fyre Festival and become newsworthy. Typical headlines will involve the elves sat around smoking with no snow anywhere on site and the general appearance of the 'wonderland' being more like a refugee camp.
'One mum who visited the Christmas gala event in Cumbria, which cost £25 for a family of four, said her kids had more fun walking home'
Clearly this is a list that gets added to every year and I am wondering whether this would make an interesting day out, to go to a real life version of Banksy's take on a theme park.
The failed festival is in the same league however I think there is added reason for failure. Back in the day of illegal raves there was no option of failure because people would bring their own entertainment (yes, probably drugs) and be prepared for no facilities except for a sound system or two. Events were participatory, people got on with it and didn't wait around expecting to be entertained.
This festival has ignited a Twitter war between the haves and the have nots. One particularly tone deaf tweet (if you read her entire feed over the last 24 hours, you will understand why poor/middle class people dislike most outrageously rich people and vice versa):
> I'd rather be on a yacht out of touch with reality. We all our preferences; some just are unable to have them
> Just bc I'm rich doesn't mean I don't have problems. In fact I've been devastated about the furniture my decorator chose
> I'm funemloyed, much better than actually being employed. Try it sometime...if you can
Regardless, in general, disliking people just because they're rich seems unhelpful and a quick way to jealously and discontentment. Being angered by wealthy individuals who actively abuse those with less is an entirely different story though.
I looked through it and it appears not to be. My first impression was similar to yours, but all was normal on the account until the Fyre Festival and she began complaining about the conditions and how she was having problems getting her father's jet in to pick her up. Friends of hers also had private jets come get them. The things you posted were in response to criticism of her wealth and I think at that point she became angry and started going into full snob-mode.
I didn't say that I dislike rich people, I was just saying that a mutual hatred between classes seems to be common in today's America. Her recent Twitter feed puts that on full display.
Yeah, just posted. My point still stands, there was a lot of hate being spewed at legitimate attendees. It figures that I choose to single out one that turns out to be an authentic looking troll that reveals it just after I mention it, but that's just my bad luck.
No, because even if this account is real, most rich people do not agree with this person. This is one possibly-real person being a bad person. No need to spin that into a theory about class hatred.
My apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you dislike rich people, or anything about you personally! My comments were just reflecting on my own experiences of feeling antipathy towards those with more and trying to figure out what's productive and what's unhealthy.
Snobbery exists everywhere. Programmers snobbishly complain about bad programmers. Workers snobbishly complain about people who hire workers to do their work for them. Rich complain about poor. Poor complain about rich. Everyone wants to feel superior and snobbery provides that.
I mean, there's a good chance that the person you're complaining about didn't have all the same benefits you've had -- education, mentoring, upbringing, genetic, whatever. It's a very explicit "why can't everyone be as great as I am?"
It also makes you a bad coworker: if you have energy to whine, you have energy to teach.
Ed:
It would be nice if the people who disagree would explain why.
I'm honestly curious why people complaining about coworkers think it's anything but an entitled whine.
I guess I should clarify my point. We (the IT department in my company) have been teaching the content editor (she updated the wordpress site) how to do HTML and some Python. She is effectively a junior developer now. I am completely fine with teaching people if they are keen to learn and I know people have to start somewhere.
What got on my nerves was previous co-workers when you try and show them a better way of doing something and they just don't care. They do it to keep you happy there and then, then back to their crappy ways a week later and usually I need to clean up the mess involved.
Give me an enthusiastic newbie over an unenthusiastic "one year ten times" developer any day.
Have you ever tried to teach someone who is uninterested in learning? Or simply unable? They do exist, definitely. Right now I've got someone on my team who has excellent knowledge of academic computer science principles, and no appreciation for practical reality. This is a constant source of friction since real life so rarely looks like a textbook problem. We have tried, and tried, and tried to explain that, but he continues to be a merciless pedant and on top of that his code is simply atrocious. This is what I would call a bad programmer, and I don't feel the least bit snobbish for wanting him off my team.
Toronto seems to have about 5 food festival failures every summer. The last one I remember being everywhere on social media was a grilled cheese one. But there are numerous food truck ones where almost everyone runs out of food or line ups are multi-hour affairs.
I'd thought it an impossible task to put on a good food based festival for a long time but Gilroy did a pretty good job with their Garlic festival. The trick seemed to be have about 5 stalls for every vendor and stick them in opposite edges so if the line is long at the Garlic Ice Cream booth you just keep walking around the edge a bit to the next booth from the same company selling the same stuff.
> where almost everyone runs out of food or line ups are multi-hour affairs.
Yeah, this seems to be getting more common (maybe because the people running the festivals make a nice profit?).
I was at a hot wings festival recently. In a two-hour line for 4 wings. Then they ran out of wings, beer, and all liquids, including water. It ended up being ~$10/wing, 1 wing/hour.
I heard about that one. Paul McCartney didn't show up because his band was on the run, so he flew like an eagle. But fortunately a mellifluous Chinese vocalist showed up and sang a song. [1]
Portland Oregon has pretty good food (and beer) festivals regularly, and I think the key thing is that there's a pretty heavy organizational overlap with city-run yearly 'county fair' type festivals - down to repurposing the same ticketing schemes from rides for food instead - just with the higher-class restaurateurs involved replacing the usual 'fair food' grease-and-fries types.
I've always wanted to go to that festival. Maybe next year.
I've seen some pretty epic failures, especially if they do good early on and get too much exposure. There was a garlic festival in the Hudson Valley that got way too much exposure on Food Network and was turned into an overcrowded nightmare. (Amplified by the number of Manhattanitrs out of their native environment)
Another one was a food truck festival where they spread the thing out too wide, so you had to be on a death march to actually see everything!
Birmingham, AL (US) must be really lucky with their festival scene. They have several significant festivals every year:
Sidewalk Film Festival
Sloss Fest
Brew Fest
Slice Fest
Secret Stages
I'm not sure if it is the local support or that they're just smaller. I expect we may have had a lot of excellent event organizers with solid experience looking for new jobs after City Stages wound down. City Stages was a 20+ year music festival that was generally successful logistically, but wasn't profitable.
When you think of it, though. If there are 5+ 10-20k attendance festivals every year in every metro area over 500k there are bound to be some regular screwups.
Fyre is a tech startup, and fyre festival was marketing for it.
It's an example of how "move fast and break things" can work out poorly when the things being broken end with with people stranded away from home without access to basic sanitation.
Motherboard indicates that the parent company is also in trouble.[1] Their "talent booking app" is a long way from release. Employee pay is intermittent. New hires not provided with computers. Employee morale low.
They claim to have a talent booking service now, and it's web-based.[2] There's no big advantage in moving it to an app. There are already at least six other talent booking apps.
And it shows not to believe your own hype no matter how much you generate. Hype doesn't deliver the MVP, logistics and execution deliver the MVP.
Although people paying that kind of money want a tad bit more than minimum.
[edit] I really don't want to make fun of other people's misfortune, but I couldn't help but think that would have made an awesome setting for a sequel to Tucker & Dale vs. Evil.
Not to mention how not to market it; if the organisers hadn't marketed packages worth tens of thousands of pounds for villas that didn't exist they might have got a bit more sympathy for ending up with a not-quite-ready MVP.
The number one issue with this festival for those of us in the Caribbean (and those of us who are also involved in the entertainment industry) is that this casts a very negative image on festivals here in general.
This is in spite of the fact that throughout the region, much larger and more elaborate events occur frequently, e.g. carnival in Trinidad (and everywhere else), St. Lucia Jazz Fest, Reggae Sumfest, SXM, countless large sporting events like the ICC Cricket World Cup, etc.
I'm performing at a new one called Tmrw.Tday in Negril in two weeks - luckily the Fyre thing happened too late to affect ticket sales for that one I think.
As a followup, the New York Post reports that the Fyre company is facing an employee revolt. If the paychecks aren't delivered today, a mass exodus is expected.[1] The company may not make it to Monday.
It happens all the time even in small scale. One of the food fests for example, when I got there, there were foods that had nothing to do with the theme and they started mark up prices on the spot because there wasn't enough. Never mind I had to pay to get in on the first place and the food was horrible.
This sounds like a repeat of the Dashcon fiasco. Complete with overpromised celebrities who never show up, captive audience, and underdelivered entertainment venues.
Are you saying that there's a certain level of wealth that makes getting scammed okay? Just so people can prepare themselves to not get too "rich", what is that threshold?
I look forward to the deeper investigative reporting on precisely how that mess worked out as badly as it did, but the combination of promise-vs-reality mismatch and the rough PR afterwards suggests incompetence on all levels.