What the Fyre Festival Shows about American Wealth Politics

The 2017 Fyre Festival was marketed as an opulent music festival of internet-breaking magnitude. Headliners included Blink-182, Tyga, Pusha T, and other major musicians. Mastermind Billy MacFarland, in collaboration with rapper Ja Rule, promoted the festival as an idyllic bacchanal in the Bahamas, with ticket packages costing up to $250,000, promising perks such as a ride in a private yacht.

In a failure of spectacular proportions, every musician pulled out of the festival. Attendees were given prepackaged sandwiches, not gourmet meals. Instead of luxury bungalows, they were housed in tents that resembled FEMA-issued hurricane shelters. The ensuing chaos was compared to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies; attendees resorted to stealing mattresses and luggage. Some reportedly fainted from the heat. The Fyre Festival’s colossal fallout spawned intense social media commentary, inspired two documentaries, and made an indelible mark on contemporary pop culture.

Intergenerational wealth, or the lack thereof, has come to define the American life, and as such has left deep claw marks on the American psyche.

The entire debacle was breathlessly documented on social media. Some attendees called it “a complete disaster” and “mass chaos.” People watching the events unfurl on social media hurled jeers in tweets that were potent with schadenfreude. Twitter user @chrisdelia tweeted that the Fyre Festival “is my favorite. You paid 12k to see Ja Rule in the Bahamas? And when you GOT there you realized you were ripped off?” @maddecent called the festival “NAKED AND AFRAID FOR RICH KIDS.”

Many tweets were infused with righteousness and justice, as if to say that the famous, despite their wealth and power, aren’t immune from discomfort and chaos. @RuleYork tweeted “Thank you all for participating in the Fyre Festival social experiment, where we exposed hundreds of millenials who have never experienced true adversity [to] the hardships facing refugees in foreign countries…. we walk away from this event with a new perspective on the human condition.” 

Although facetious, the “social experiment” remark rings true; the fallout from the Fyre Festival reflects a truth about American society and shows how social media is shaping the politics of wealth. The joy that many felt at witnessing the discomfort of wealthy millennials stems from the fact that until the Fyre Festival, most of the attendees had apparently never faced any hardship. In accordance with the unspoken laws of social media, they exclusively posted content showcasing highlights of their idyllic lives; to do otherwise would have risked losing face, followers, and exposure.

In a stunning, uniquely capitalist stunt, when we observe these posts on social media, we ourselves are consuming conspicuous consumption.

The Fyre Festival debacle, and the social media response, has also shown how invested we are in sharing our lives through social media, and how eagerly we consume the lives of others. Social media is sometimes portrayed by boomers as a dark specter that steals our time, attention, and peace of mind; others paint it as a new, genuine form of human connection through a quadrangle of light. While the truth probably flirts with both extremes, our intense affinity for social media reveals a new frontier for the human experience and the body politic.

Social media has become the foremost way of displaying wealth, in an age where wealth politics are shifting markedly. As the American economy has raced to dizzying heights, socioeconomic mobility has slowed to a glacial crawl. According to a report released by the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis, there has been a consistent decline in American social mobility since 1980. More dramatically, the lower quintile of the economy is almost frozen; a report by the Pew Charitable Trust and the Economic Mobility Project showed that Americans born into the lowest quintile of wealth are overwhelmingly likely to stay there.

Popularized since our nation’s conception, the American dream celebrates the ability of any individual to rise in the economic ranks with hard work, but it now seems that the reality of capitalist economics has shaken America awake. Harvard researcher Raj Chetty showed a near-linear relationship between the economic status of parents and their children. (“A 10 percentile point increase in parent rank is associated with a 3.41 percentile increase in a child’s income rank on average.”) Intergenerational wealth, or the lack thereof, has come to define the American life, and as such has left deep claw marks on the American psyche.

For those who watch with bitterness and longing as the famous flaunt their wealth, the Fyre Festival was a refreshing subversion of the traditional socioeconomic order.

For many influencers, most of social media performance involves displaying wealth, and conspicuous consumption has become commonplace. In a stunning, uniquely capitalist stunt, when we observe these posts on social media, we ourselves are consuming conspicuous consumption. For those who watch with bitterness and longing as the famous flaunt their wealth, the Fyre Festival was a refreshing subversion of the traditional socioeconomic order. Moreover, the response to the festival heralds a new era of identity and wealth. As we move deeper into a world that is increasingly social media-dominated, we must think seriously about how we represent ourselves, online and in person, and evaluate whether material wealth should be as integral to our identities as we make it seem.