Monetizing Failure: Fyre Fraud,Social Media,and the Normalization of Crisis

The Fyre Festival was billed as the must-attend event of 2017. The festival planners, hip hop artist Ja Rule, entrepreneur Billy McFarland, and marketing team FuckJerry Media sold it as a once in a generation experience: a luxury music festival hosted on a private island in the Bahamas with performances from major recording artists and the opportunity to rub elbows with Instagram's most attractive celebrities. Fyre Fest is remarkable not because it delivered this fantasy to concertgoers but because the festival never happened. Patrons arrived to find disheveled stages, partially constructed FEMA tents, and muddy rain-soaked mattresses. As the disaster unfolded, music acts withdrew in rapid succession. The event went viral as attendees flooded social media with photos and videos documenting the event's decrepit conditions. Two years later, two competing documentaries Fyre Fraud (Hulu) and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened (Netflix) recounted the events leading up to the festival's demise (Furst & Willoughby, 2019; Smith, 2019). Both films featured firsthand accounts explaining how and why the festival was such a spectacular failure—or perhaps even a scam.

After the festival collapsed, several musicians who agreed to perform were never paid and local workers and vendors were left to foot the bill. Subsequent law enforcement investigations found that McFarland had orchestrated several Ponzi-style schemes to finance ballooning costs. He also committed multiple acts of bank and wire fraud for which he was ultimately arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to six years in prison (Moynihan, 2018). The workers employed to help create the festival were never fully paid for their labor, and multiple lawsuits against the conference organizers and promoters led to large payouts to plaintiffs. A class action suit awarded $7,200 in damage to 277 ticketholders in 2021, but lawyers for the plaintiffs have been unable to collect the award from the festival's trustee (BBC News, 2021)

Although Fyre Fest never happened, the publicity surrounding the event never entirely ended either. Many of the event's planners and promoters have sought to resuscitate their brand image and extract value from the catastrophe. Perhaps surprisingly, the festival's original stakeholders deliberately embraced its failure. Billy MacFarland started his own podcast Dumpster Fyre to poke fun at his ineptitude; public relations manager Andy King became a spokesman for Evian water after admitting to Netflix's cameras that he attempted to bribe a customs official with oral sex in exchange for releasing the festival's drinking water; and Ja Rule sold several lucrative non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with the festival's demise. Undertaken to restore the brand identities of those most closely connected to the festival's failure, these activities illustrate how spectacles of fraud and financial failure represent financial opportunities for the entrepreneurial subject in the contemporary digital economy. These tongue-in-cheek self-branding efforts illustrate how the failure of dubious financial enterprises can be infused with ironic cultural capital.

Fyre Fest's afterlife illuminates an emerging development within a growing failure industry. Over the past decade, a variety of literature catering to the enterprising businessperson has encouraged readers to welcome failure as an opportunity for learning, improvement, and growth. They include self-help seminars (Failforward.com, The Failure Institute), podcasts (Professional Failure, Success Through Failure, How to Fail With Elizabeth Day, My Perfect Failure, Failure Guy), books (John C. Maxwell's Failing Forward, Tom Hartford's Adapt, and Scott Adam's How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big), and branded entertainment (FailCon, Fail Fest). Much of this material subverts the stigma surrounding failed business by illustrating how some amount of personal failure is inevitable but temporary in the business world. For instance, Scudamore (2018), founder of a trash removal service 1-800-Got-Junk, touts his self-published title WTF?! (Willing to Fail): How Failure Can Be Your Key to Success as an opportunity for readers to learn from his mistakes so they can “take the road less traveled” and enjoy the “adventure of entrepreneurship” (p. 16). In addition to self-help literature, retail businesses offer whimsical products that promote ironic nostalgia for formerly prominent but ultimately failed enterprises. In 2021, a kiosk at the Denver International Airport sold t-shirts emblazoned with the logos of now defunct airlines including Pan-Am and TWA. Fyre Fest's afterlife marks a shift in the failure industry's ethos. Instead of illustrating how business leaders have grown from their mistakes or eliciting nostalgia for formerly reputable brands, McFarland, King, and JaRule took to the internet to capitalize upon the spectacle of their criminal, abject, and otherwise morally dubious actions.

We analyze the media rebranding of individuals connected to the Fyre Festival to illuminate the developing character of the failure industry and the conditions that foster its emergence. The rebranding of Fyre Festival illustrates the unique confluence of neoliberal crisis and the entrepreneurial logics of social media. This confluence enables failed entrepreneurs to exploit their own abject spectacles of fraud and open disregard for the welfare of others into lucrative opportunities. Through engagement with digital and social media platforms hungry for attention, entrepreneurs who have failed via ethically dubious or fraudulent financial schemes are able to resuscitate their value and monetize their failure by foregrounding their spectacularly unethical behavior. They illustrate how criminal activity, self-debasement, and disregard for the welfare of those most directly harmed by dishonest business ventures can be monetized through unrelenting spin, ironic self-branding, and the commodification of kitsch. These strategies illustrate the emerging character of a socially mediated failure industry that revels not only in failure but in the unprincipled nature of risk-taking in the current economy. We conclude by reflecting how the entrepreneurial activities and discourses in the aftermath of the festival are indicative of evolving entrepreneurial logics that turn away from positive affirmations of capital accumulation toward the routinized and detached enjoyment of neoliberal spectacle.

How Failure Becomes a Brand?

The failure industry illustrates how entrepreneurial discourses must routinely reframe and exonerate persistent economic crises induced by neoliberal capitalism's abandonment of the public good and embrace of reckless risk-taking (Davies, 2016; Harvey, 2007). Neoliberalism is broadly understood as an economic philosophy grounded in free market competition and minimal government intervention in private enterprise. President Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK ushered in the neoliberal era of policy planning through state divestment from public services and the recalibration of state policy according to market logics (Hall, 2011). de Gay (1996) notes a key moment in the neoliberal revolution when the competitive pressures of globalization induced corporations to outsource or downsize the labor force. This transformation unseated a crucial labor model underwritten by post-War economic planning whereby workers could depend on waged labor, unions, pensions and other forms of social safety-nets to secure a decent standard of living.

This economic transformation remolded individuals according to logics of competition. Unable to depend on the formal labor market for economic certainty, workers are compelled to adopt an entrepreneurial outlook of themselves as human capital (Brown, 2019). In Foucault's (2010) words, the ideal neoliberal subject transformed into an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital” (p. 225). Since the entrepreneurial subject's central preoccupation is investment in themselves as a commodity that can be bought or sold, entrepreneurial logics exchange morality for rational choice and freedom for the maximization of utility and profitability. Brown (2015) adds that such “responsibilized” subjects invest in themselves as human capital and assume the risks entailed by the marketplace (p. 134). Ultimately, entrepreneurialism transforms every worker into an agent responsible for their own employment, welfare, health, and security—accruing debt and financial risk along the way but with the distant promise of a good life.

The entrepreneur holds a special place in the neoliberal period as an actor in the marketplace who engages in risk-taking to create new markets for capital investments. The rewards of risk-taking include the possibility of extraordinary wealth, status, and even celebrity; however, most entrepreneurs are destined to fail on account of the overwhelming structural inequalities of a market society. Neoliberal principles dictate that the entrepreneurialized individual bears the responsibility for both their personal failures and the structural failures of the state and the market. Public protection and safeguards from the reckless decision-making of venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, and unscrupulous opportunists who profit from other people's misery have been replaced by civil attorneys and GoFundMe accounts designed to help people seek restitution, albeit for a price.

The ubiquitous failure of neoliberal policy and its economic rationality corresponds to a range of discourses that have normalized failure as a necessary accompaniment to an increasingly competitive and ubiquitous marketplace. As an intensification of the neoliberal project of remaking society, the entrepreneurial subject not only accepts extreme risk; it welcomes failure as an opportunity. U.S. business culture is rife with entrepreneurial figures of some means who embrace their own failure to secure their own financial status and brand image, even as that failure has harmful and often devastating implications for those who are implicated in the entrepreneur's risky endeavors. In the past decade, entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley have embraced the ethos of failure. Elon Musk once referenced playwriter Samuel Beckett's infamous line: “‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ And that's what keeps me going, in many ways” (O’Connell, 2014). The new common sense is that failure produces innovations, cultivates creativity, and liberates individuals from the constraints of existing markets. Sandler (2017) argues that the “fail fast, fail often” credo is by no means idiosyncratic to technology markets. The self-valorization of failure has “trickled down into new conceptions of work” (p. 192). Instead of demonizing individuals for failure, entrepreneurialism praises failure as the underwriting condition of a risk society in which subjects must wager the present for a more successful future.

As social media platforms have intensified the neoliberal logics of self-branding, celebrity, and attention-seeking, the failure industry has flourished. User-generated participatory social media offer platforms for entrepreneurial subjects to flood digital networks with branded content to steer public conversations and build cultural capital. As Lair et al. (2005) explain, self-branding is “a strategy [that] has become increasingly important as a flexible response to a crowded communication world” (p. 312). There are a virtually limitless number of platforms for entrepreneurial self-branding and personal monetization (Carah & Angus, 2018). Observing that new media platforms train users to self-brand and reward them with status and the promise of upward mobility in a precarious economy, Marwick (2015) concludes that social media “provides a blueprint for how to prosper in a society where status is predicated on the cultural logics of celebrity, according to which the highest value is given to mediation, visibility, and attention” (p. 14). In this social media landscape, entrepreneurs with reputations for engaging in unethical or illegal business practices have been able to monetize their failings, plugging their sullied reputations back into circuits of social media culture to convert their losses into assets. Social media affords scam artists and fraudsters with means to embrace and reframe their reckless entrepreneurialism as object lessons in the virtues of failure, and profitable ones at that. Such circuits underwrite what Jenkins (2014) calls a “control society” where everyday failures are “organized into [a] spectacle” of surveillance, self-discipline, and consumption (p. 460).

As the phrase itself illustrates, the monetization of failure is a deeply ironic process. It requires media attention that exposes the depths of a failed endeavor and makes a spectacle of the repercussions for those involved; it then reframes these repercussions through creative rearrangement of the codes that initially gave meaning to the spectacle. As a disingenuous strategy of self-promotion, ironic engagement diffuses critique through the humorous embrace of one's failings. Some critics warn that such ironic playfulness may not promote social critique. Shugart (1999) explains that, “because it is necessarily defined by the premise that it seeks to subvert, the ironic text may inadvertently reify and reproduce the very meanings its seeks to problematize” (p. 436). While self-promotion in the terms associated with one's failures elicits ironic detachment from the harmful consequences of financial collapse, a detached fanbase of curious onlookers is required for such failure to have a lucrative afterlife. Such ironic enjoyment of failure blurs the boundaries between biting satire and earnest investments in capitalism. Cloud (2010) advances the concept of the “irony bribe,” to name this form of detached enjoyment that cultivates simultaneous earnest ideological investment and ironic reflexivity toward mediated texts. As we illustrate in our analysis, ironic modes of enjoyment allowed the Fyre Festival creators to monetize signs of their ineptitude. Once they had become subjects of media condemnation, they harnessed their attention and infamy to pursue new business endeavors.

Conditions of irony within social media networks perpetuate ironic enjoyment of events that might otherwise be subjected to more obvious satire. In digital environments, it is difficult to distinguish between playful debunking of capitalist spectacles and the simple normalization or detached enjoyment of disaster. Whereas the insights inspired by traditional forms of literary irony depend on audiences who are capable of discerning the divergence between the figurative and the literal (Booth, 1974; Burke, 1969), irony deployed in social networks is often decontextualized and, therefore, devoid of the cues that typically enable audiences to discern the difference between what is said versus what is meant (Gal, 2019). With low barriers to participation and creative tools for managing self-representation, digital networks are so saturated in communication that they destabilize what constitutes a fact, or even consensus reality (Gunn, 2018).

In the following analysis we illustrate how the festival's stakeholders recoded the spectacle surrounding the event's failure to elicit ironic detachment from the fraudulent and harmful consequences of their actions. The stakeholders achieved this feat by exploiting the playful uncertainty of meaning afforded by social media. As such, the stakeholders normalized illicit entrepreneurialism by marketing new products and services to consumers habituated to the spectacular enjoyment of neoliberal failure.

Networking Fyre Fest's Failure

The media spectacle surrounding Fyre Fest situates McFarland's, King's, and JaRule's efforts to rebrand themselves and monetize their failure. McFarland and Ja Rule conceived the festival to promote their mobile application, Fyre, that would allow users to directly book elite musical acts themselves. Yet, Ja Rule and McFarland lacked the experience, preparation, and knowledge necessary to execute a large music festival, particularly on an accelerated timeline. They were far better at promoting the event. Marketing team FuckJerry Media paid social media influencers hundreds of thousands of dollars to post a distinctive orange tile that linked to a fantastical promotional video, which featured gorgeous supermodels lounging on luxury yachts adjacent to white sands, crystal blue Caribbean waters, and breathtaking island views. The planners sold 95% of available tickets which ranged anywhere between $1,500 and $250,000 USD within the first 24 hours of the launch of their social media campaign.

The event went viral a second time as attendees arrived at the festival grounds and flooded social media with photos and videos documenting the event's spectacular failure. The festival's failure was perhaps more spectacular than the material designed to promote the event itself. In the immediate aftermath, the “Fyre Fraud” was fodder for news and late-night talk programs that poked fun at the superficiality of Instagram influence culture and mocked credulous well-to-do millennials who fell for the scam.

The competing documentaries, Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened (hereafter FYRE) further extended the life of the festival as they tapped into a cultural appetite for stories interrogating fraudulent activities committed by high-ranking public figures. For film scholar Marc Francis, the films are among the recent bevy of “bio-con” documentaries that aim to make sense of the “mass erosion of truth and justice” after Trump's election (Francis, 2020). New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino tells Fyre Fraud's cameras in reference to McFarland's numerous fraudulent endeavors, “In the millennial era, scamming is the air we breathe. … One of the best ways of making money in America is to get really good at exploiting people and to treat everyone like a mark” (quoted in First & Nason).

Additional media attention to these “dueling” documentaries contributed to the spectacle surrounding the festival. FYRE gave a platform to the marketing agencies involved in its promotion: Matte Projects and FuckJerry (now Jerry Media). Both agencies co-produced FYRE. Among the two documentaries, FYRE focused more attention on McFarland's culpability than its competitor, Fyre Fraud, which foregrounded the role social media marketing played in luring wealthy millennials to the festival site. FYRE repackaged exclusive behind the scenes footage to portray the marketing teams as equally duped by McFarland's fraudulent claims about his company's finances. Both documentaries were an effort by social media marketers to recoup losses and generate positive attention by selling the footage of the festival's duplicitous promotional materials and shaping content to background their own culpability for the disastrous results.

As marketing agencies sought restore their own image in the wake of initial coverage of the festival's failure, other figures involved in planning the festival sought to profit from the renewed interest in the festival cultivated by these dueling documentaries. After the documentaries’ release, several individuals involved in Fyre Fest exploited the spectacles of their malfeasance via a variety of social media platforms to rebrand themselves and establish new business ventures. In the process, they developed a symbiotic relationship with others seeking to build their own brands through networked media. A variety of new media studios and marketers jumped at the opportunity to form “partnerships” with the misbegotten figures from Fyre Fest. These partnerships provided these failed entrepreneurs with platforms to reframe their activities, even as these platforms also highlighted their malfeasance. The remainder of this essay details these events as indicative of evolving entrepreneurial logics that seek to normalize reckless and illicit business practices.

Cornering the Failure Market

Investigating the posthumous legacy of the Fyre Festival illustrates how the rise of networked media represents an intersection between technological and economic conjunctures that produces new kinds of entrepreneurial subjects. Through a combination of branding, reputation management, and expendable capital, the new entrepreneur is free to fail at anything and everything—including fraudulent activity—so long as they live to sell the story. In attending to how Fyre Festival stakeholders monetized and rebranded themselves through mediating the spectacle of the festival's failure itself, we have illustrated how failure artists absolve neoliberal capitalism of responsibility for the devastation it has wrought. Beyond presenting failure as a learning opportunity, these entrepreneurs invited ironic consumption of the symbols that marked the fraudulent and exploitative nature of the endeavors.

There is a larger network of failure artists that extends beyond the festival where enterprising entrepreneurs strive to market the lessons of their failures as products via books, courses, and speaking events. This market is facilitated through what we would characterize as failure networks, as a variety of podcasters and websites link to one another as helpful resources on how to succeed at failing. In our research for this article, every source became an entry point to another online resource touting failure as the key to success. Across these sources, a variety of white, affluent men brand themselves as entrepreneurial gurus, eager to help others learn to start over after job loss, albeit for a price. Such entrepreneurialism is made possible by the affordances of networked media that enable a relatively small group of like-minded failure artists to construct a virtual echo chamber in which failure is success, risk is reward, and greed, as always, is good.

The monetization of failure through relentless spin, irony and kitsch has implications that go beyond documented cases of fraudulent business practices. Ironic failure branding functions to acclimate entrepreneurial citizens to the heightened risks of neoliberal capitalism. The failures of neoliberalism—both big and small—create a proverbial fork-in-the-road. One road leads us to rethink or discard the logics of entrepreneurialism, human capital, and disaster capitalism as unsustainable and threatening to the future of the planet. The other, gilded with iron pyrite, moves us to reinvest—albeit ironically—in free market delusions. As Sandler observes, “if everyone is an artist of failure, and this collective presumption legitimizes the unstable economic conditions produced by neoliberalism, then redemptive critical attitudes toward the art of failure may not be what the present demands” (p. 192). In other words, the ability to ironically consume the symbols of catastrophic financial ruin aligns with the broader project of neoliberalism to reframe economic exploitation, capital flight, market crashes, debt bubbles, and other consequences of speculative capitalism as good business.

The mediated spectacle of the festival's failure is a microcosm of a broader cycle of risk-taking, failure, and damage that propels economic development under neoliberalism. As Klein suggests, international monetary institutions take the same approach. Debt defaults and market crashes in the Global South are seen as opportunities to restructure their economies in ways that financially benefit the West. As the history of “development” in the Global South illustrates, the intrinsic value of those whose labor and money are needed to warrant a risk takers’ ventures—workers, consumers, and spectators—lies in their potential to be exploited. Given the immense capital required of entrepreneurial activity in an economically stratified society, putting others at risk has become also not only acceptable but necessary in a neoliberal market economy. In this system, those who feel the greatest impact of that failure are necessary to sustain the system. Once they are no longer exploitable, they are expendable. For precarious populations forced to wager their future on risk-taking adventures absent an abundant supply of other people's money, failure is not merely a business lesson or kitschy souvenir. It is a matter of survival.