So we watched the Netflix documentary on the Fyre Festival a while back – you know, the one produced by one of the companies responsible for producing the festival in the first place, in an attempt to get themselves out ahead of a more incisive documentary on Hulu that might implicate people other than just Billy McFarland (or noted Rhodes scholar and neurosurgeon Ja Rule). It was every bit as appalling as you’d expect – basically a shit ton of money thrown at “influencers” to inflate a bubble of unreality that survived right up until people started showing up, despite the gigantic flashing warning signs that DANGER, COLOSSAL FUCK-UP AHEAD. And the thing is, this simply wouldn’t have been possible without the Internet. In fact it wouldn’t have been possible without Facebook’s platforms, which appear to have been the principal means of advertising and driving this fiasco.
Which drives home the biggest problem of the social media era: it has almost completely removed the guardrails. In the early days of the Internet, there was a lot more self-selection, because you had to be competent to sort out your TCP and your SLIP or PPP and work your way around USENET or Gopher or whatever. The effect of freely available wide-open social media has been to flatten information and remove gatekeepers – but without considering whether those gatekeepers might have served a useful function sometimes. If Billy McFarland had to go through the usual promotional channels to put on his festival, he couldn’t have gotten nearly as far as he was able to by just giving money to Instagram “influencers.” Bullshit candidates like Morry Taylor or Steve Forbes got weeded out of the GOP primaries quickly and easily – none of the GOP’s nominees after Bob Dole would have made good Presidents but at least they weren’t completely off the map until 2016. The re-mainstreaming of white supremacy would have been impossible before the Internet because the valid channels wouldn’t do it and the channels that were available tended to be badly mimeographed and poorly spelled – at a time when that was still a signifier.
There are many things the Internet has brought us, but “utter bullshit now lives on an equal footing with reality” almost makes it all not worth it. Removing mediators sounds good until you realize those mediators were there for a reason and performed a vital function – and if it was imperfect, the thing to do was fix and repair, not abandon completely. But that’s the boomer ethos with the rules, and their rich kids got it too: rules are for suckers, rules are for other people, and so are consequences.The one bright side is that if you got rooked on Fyre Festival, you could probably afford it, and maybe it’s God’s way of telling you that you’ve got more money than brains.
Would that there were more such reckonings in the offing.