How much you enjoy Hype will probably depend on how much you know about Billy McFarland and his infamous Fyre Festival. It became clear to me that there was something bigger at play: the natural end point of a society primed to trust their own emotions over objective, verifiable facts, in a world that tends to value the signifiers of success over actual achievements. It’s all about the likes at the end of the day… The whole Fyre saga is a fascinating insight into online influencing culture, who it targets and who it benefits and in Hype, Gabrielle Bluestone – a Vice journalist and executive producer of the Netflix Fyre documentary – aims to explore how social media has been harnessed to sell above all else, and how users are happy to turn a blind eye to something that is obviously too good to be true if it offers the possibility of a sharable social media moment. McFarland had, in actual fact, spent those millions on parties for himself, on one advert featuring five top supermodels who never planned attending and on social media personalities who swayed their followers to buy tickets to an event that never was, eventually pleaded guilty to defrauding his investors and going to jail. How were thousands of switched-on millennials duped into buying tickets for something which was clearly too good to be true, and how were inexperienced, clueless people like McFarland able to give the impression that they could pull something of this magnitude off, and attract millions of dollars of investment, with no successful track record in the field?
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