Not if they consider themselves “temporarily embarrassed” members of that upper 0.1% who could afford to throw away money to get a preview of their “rightful” place.
No, but we’re not talking about hating the victims of the Fyre Festival scam. We’re talking about having a little less sympathy than we might otherwise have had for those who weren’t suckers enough to pay a premium price based on the unfulfillable promise that a ticket would allow one to live like a Kardashian for a couple of days.
Confidence artists deserve the lion’s share of disdain and mockery when the scam is exposed, but they’d be nothing without greedy and foolish marks.
Jason and Jennifer Suburbanite aspire to be in the top 10%, for one thing. Also, they usually don’t have so much money that they can blithely throw away a thousand dollars on an aspect of the experience that offers no tangible value. That consciousness of value is why they tend to spend $4000 on an all-inclusive fancy 7-day cruise offered by a reputable company rather than spend it on being star-f*ckers at a two-day event run by serial grifters and incompetents.
I don’t know about you, but it is for me once a scam has been exposed. I have less sympathy for an upper middle class sucker who’s greedy enough to and has the means to buy into a Ponzi scheme that promises 14% annual returns in perpetuity, and I have less sympathy for an upper middle class sucker who’s foolish enough to throw away money on an unsubstantiated promise that he’ll be able to hang out with supermodels and rock stars on an exclusive private island for two days.
Again, that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathise with the Fyre Festival marks for being placed in what sounds like a truly dangerous and scary situation.
Well, yeah, if they’re still buying-in after the scam is exposed, then you’ve got some room for schadenfreude. However, most victims don’t know they’re going to be victims until after they’re victims. Victim blaming (no matter how rich, poor, drunk, or provocatively dressed they are) is never OK.
Agreed, and I touched on this earlier. Saying that, in general, folks should be better prepared when they travel is one thing, saying “These folks, being who they are, deserve this” is the sort of specific blaming that’s not ok here.
Less sympathy != no sympathy. If I say an educated professional should have known better than to believe Bernie Madoff’s promises of on-going 14% annual returns or that he might have let greed get the better of his common sense is that victim-blaming?
Suppose for a moment that these particular con men had at least been competent. So no feral dogs, no roaming thieves, no fighting over food and water, etc. Now imagine these Tweets from the $4000 VIPs:
“Fyre Festival is a ripoff. Paid for VIP access but didn’t meet one supermodel”
“What a scam. Luxury tents look nothing like the photos on the website. USAID surplus!”
“‘Gourmet food’ is chicken pesto sandwiches they wouldn’t serve at Pret a Manger! Limp arugula!”
“Should have brought a telescope to see the bands from my ‘VIP’ seating!”
“Said bring no money, but now charging credit card extra for FyreBux to buy cigs and booze.”
“When Ja Rule and Billy said luxury that’s what I expect. So disappointed!”
Still as sympathetic to the marks in this hypothetical? It’s still a scam, there are still victims. I guarantee that if the organisers hadn’t been total clowns this is how the grift would have played out and how the suckers would have responded (along with lawsuits).
But in your imagined scenario, they still didn’t get what they paid for. The agreement between seller and buyer is still broken. And while in this imagined scenario no one is in any apparent danger, the buyers are still victims of a scam. Wealth doesn’t erase humanity.
That’s all correct and I completely agree. I’m asking if you’re as sympathetic to them in the hypothetical situation as you are for them in the actual situation.
That’s all I’m saying. I save the bulk of my sympathy for people in situations I’m seriously worried about. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to show a little sympathy for someone who stubbed his toe doing something stupid, but I’m going to be a heck of a lot more sympathetic to someone fighting cancer. And if the person who stubbed his toe also has cancer, the latter is where the bulk of my sympathy and worry is going to be focused; I might even comment on the stupid thing he did to stub his toe, if only to put things in perspective.
I wouldn’t say all of them knew – from what I’ve read some of the victims were just plain naive and ignorant about how finance works and trusted the charming sociopath with the distinguished career. But I agree that a lot of them knew and just got greedy. I have a bit more sympathy for the former than for the latter.
It’s a big leap from “teasing my friend for stubbing their toe” to “total lack of empathy towards humans who have been victims of a crime.” I’m simply not comfortable with that amount of moral relativism.
All victims deserve empathy and justice – even the rich ones – because the fraudsters who preyed on them are still criminals, even if you don’t lose sleep over their crimes.
Serious logistical planning for the festival didn’t even begin until late February or early March — less than two months before the thousands of people McFarland had sold a luxury vacation on a private island were scheduled to arrive. The toilet and shower supplier, who did not get the Fyre Festival contract, told the organizers it would cost north of $1 million just to order the equipment — a rush-order mark-up he unironically referred to as “disaster pricing.” That number did not include the cost of shipping the equipment to the island or the high cost of the barge needed to dispose of the wastewater created by thousands of people showering and using the toilet for four days.
Fyre Festival employees said planning for the event took on the feel of an extended Spring Break frat party. McFarland and members of his team would fly down “every other weekend for lavish vacations” on nearby islands, but only male employees and models were allowed to go. “Billy would take all the boys down there, it would be boys only,” the employee said. “They talk about f—ing bitches and hoes in conference meetings.”
"Most buyers had paid somewhere between $500 and $2,000 for their tickets, despite outlandish claims that people were purchasing ticket packages for hundreds of thousands of dollars. "
So just some average working peeps taking a cheap-to mid-range “fancy” vacation. But sure, they deserve all the scorn in the world.
Also, this is amazing. Holy crap.
Payroll abruptly stopped in the Fyre Media office in October, according to one employee at the company.
“We started getting paid as wires from Billy’s account and one time [in January] we got paid in a wad of cash. They didn’t have any money. They kept paying the influencers and the models,” the employee said.
I genuinely think they weren’t trying to defraud anyone. In their minds, they were in good faith putting on a legendary, luxury festival… they were just lazy, naive, inexperienced rich kids who never made a plan for what’d be involved in this sort of thing. I can see them saying “hey man, we’re on a tropical island! No need to worry too much about details! Folks will have a good time just hanging out on the beach!”
That said… holy crap, they didn’t start working on this until eight weeks before the festival. I just put on an all-inclusive weekend event for 70 people that myself and some friends worked on pretty much nonstop for a year and a half… and we didn’t have to arrange bathrooms or basic sanitation.
