Netflix’s Fyre and the culture of Instagram Hyperreality

Ajay Menon
The Unprofessionals
5 min readFeb 25, 2019

On the face of it, Netflix’s recent offering about the Fyre festival seems like a standard fare documentary which unveils the truth about The greatest party that never happened. There’s the con man entrepreneur Billy McFarland who teams up with rapper Ja Rule to create an app for booking musical talent, which further leads to the creation of a festival to promote the app. But things start going downhill fast after the extravagant promotional material fails to live up to its promises in what could be aptly summarised as real-life expectations vs reality meme.

But as the documentary sheds light on the chronicles that lead up to these events and follows through to the aftermath, there’s a subtext about the Instagram “personal celebrity” culture that bleeds through the narrative.

Now, the general vibe of a music festival promo video or an after-movie video sometimes has little to do with real life and more with the packaging of an experience. Scantily clad smiling sculpted people walk around sipping drinks, free from the constraints of the daily rut in order to “be in the moment” or “seize the day”. The carefully curated set of images and film that shy away from the harsh realities of jacked up prices on food and merch, overflowing port-a-loo’s, claustrophobia-inducing crowds and various other troubles that generally plague such festivals. All that pain conveniently ignored if there can be a new narrative built around it. That’s the world where the Fyre Festival exists in.

The social media influencer market that has exponentially grown in the past few years has led to the blurred lines of reality where, a brand in the guise of a person, sells people a lifestyle. Amongst the social media giants, Instagram stands out the most in the lifestyle influencing space due to the visual nature of the app. The Fyre festival equipped with a coterie of supermodels along with a slickly produced promo video was able to peddle this inevitable place to be.

The promotions started when Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski and other influencers posted an image of an orange square to their Instagram feeds. This photo led to the Fyre Festival promo video featuring supermodels running around the beaches of Norman’s Cay, which gets a special mention as the island once owned by Pablo Escobar.

Establishing Social Currency

These promotional activities thus established a set of bragging rights for its attendees. In this case:

  • A festival generously peppered with supermodels, hence asserting its elitism
  • Mentioning it being Pablo Escobar’s island gave people the license to claim to have vicariously lived the life of a drug lord
  • Being present at the music festival which made audacious claims of being, in their words, on the boundaries of the impossible

These bragging rights thus become part of a hidden social currency not just defined by the likes and comments on Instagram, but by the impressions that it doles out to followers. By being at a festival that promised luxury tents, meals from celebrity chefs amongst many other things, the prospect to amp up on the social game seemed clear.

Most of the people who signed up to be a part of it weren’t there just for the music or being in the Bahamas. But of having the chance to earn the representation of being part of an exclusive elite. The projection of this fulfilled self becomes the top priority irrespective of its reality.

This is what gives birth to the postmodern world where a layer of projected experiences lies on top of the actual. The representation of reality thus becomes in itself a reality a.k.a hyperreality, as coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. Or a better well-known adaptation of that would rather be The Matrix.

Dan Bilzerian and The American Dream

For those who unaware of who Dan Bilzerian is, he’s an American Instagram personality who's known for putting up posts with truckloads of attractive women, an arsenal of guns, a non-stop party lifestyle featuring shots of his various mansions whilst hanging out with several celebrities.

The life that Bilzerian portrays on social media is replete with hedonistic pursuits, which many people look at as a guy who does and gets what he wants. There might still be questions on how he may be as a person, but that becomes irrelevant since his identity gets cemented by the persona he creates. Since the real person can easily get enshrouded by the generated version.

Bilzerian essentially ends up becoming a brand representing a certain set of hedonistic values and all of its messaging can be carefully curated with the help of manufactured compositions in the form of images and videos. This sets up a new bar for people to get to in the influencer space at the cost of abandoning their own reality in order to forge a new one.

The Two Fyre Festivals

The fact that the spirit of Fyre festival still exists as a promised land is mentioned towards the end of the documentary that “the real Fyre festival happened twice”. The shoots and its existence on social media made it real. The premature consumption of the party life lived within vicarious minds.

This fabricated narrative is all it takes to show how Instagram can alter the perceptions of what truly exists. And it’s nothing new. The existence of Private Jet Studio, a company that does photo shoots for a couple of hours on a private jet that never takes off, brings to light this need to subvert the standard representation of self. Opulence attracts more clout thus justifying the fake it till you make it strategy.

The proliferation and success of Kim Kardashian, the role model of being famous for being famous, brings out this no holds barred approach to the celebrity culture that relies on doing whatever to attract attention.

Thus the difference between the two Fyre festivals, the dream vs the disaster, acts a mirror to the society at its image-driven culture. Since at this point in our current times, reality can be photoshopped.

When the dreams shattered on the island as it turned into a nightmarishly real rendition of the Lord of the Flies, the narrative went through a downward spiral of chaos and grievances. Signifying the fragility of this forged experience. And as all constructed veneers go, it’ll keep failing till we arrive at a convincing conclusion.

Maybe that might be Virtual Reality?

Since the greatest party that never happened, with all its celebrities and extravagance, can just play out on the participants VR headset.

If you enjoyed this piece, give it a few claps 👏 👏 so others see it too!

If you’d like to support the Unprofessionals, you can do so here or you can follow the Unprofessionals on Medium or Twitter.

--

--