Fyre

I watched Netflix’s Fyre documentary. It’s about a music festival on the Bahamas—thousand-dollar tickets, celebrity promotion, and when attendees showed up: broken tents, sick dogs, homeless people, and cheese sandwiches someone had apparently assembled in a garage. Nobody could leave. Evacuation capacity was so limited that everyone spent hours stuck on the island, filming it all on Snapchat.

The footage shows the emotional arc: excitement, confusion, actual suffering, then a blank stare. People sitting alone, waiting for a boat.

Ja Rule, one of the organizers, apologized on Twitter. Which doesn’t actually get anyone off an island.

What strikes me is how total the failure was. Not a festival with problems—a complete implosion, unfolding on a thousand phones. I’ve been to bad festivals. The food runs out, the water system breaks, your tent floods. You’re angry about it for months. But you can leave. You drive home. Here, people couldn’t. They were trapped, humiliated, waiting for evacuation. Somehow that was worse—not just a bad event, but being actually trapped.