h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm fast becoming a fan of Twitter - mostly as a reader, although there's a Post challenge coming on 8 May that's entirely due to a contact...

The instant crowd over there will tell you the 'news' before it becomes news. The tweeters also provide raw data for any number of academic papers by sociologists, psychologists, and postmodernists of every stripe.

I enjoy mentally composing the titles for these papers. Such as the one in the subject line.

Yesterday, I observed gleefully, as did so many others, the near-apocalyptic collapse of something called the Fyre Festival. In case you don't know, Fyre Festival was an elites-only rock concert, billed to be held on a private island in the Bahamas, at the utterly exclusive price of around $12,000 per ticket. It was supposed to be the ultimate luxury experience, with only the hottest groups, superior-type A-list beautiful people, something called Instamodels...you get the idea.

Forget Woodstock: this was more like Disaster Area, complete with kamikaze rocket. Only it didn't exactly happen that way.

The 'big idea' people had envisioned something beautiful: a super-festival that would make them 'legends' (their word). They've probably become legends, all right. Just not in the way they would have liked.

The big take-home message is: if you want to have a rock festival, you need to pay the artists. You need to put up tents, and rent buildings. You need to hire portable toilets. You need...oh, so many things. You need to organise the catering. (Go on Twitter for the photos of the cheese sandwiches attendees were served. Go on, you need a laugh.)

All of this work was too tedious for the 'big idea' people. They were sorely let down when the peons they hired failed to make their dreams come true - possibly because many quit when they suspected, probably correctly, that they would not be paid.

Fyre Festival turned into a disaster. You can read about it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-fyre-festival-was-a-luxury-nightmare

But Fyre Festival was far from a disaster for Twitter. The joint was buzzing. The tweets were oh-so-instructive. By reading yesterday's Twitter feed, I have discovered something vitally important about social media.

Thoughtful observers will point out that Twitter's favourite mode is outrage. Outrage is very popular on Twitter, as evidenced by the United Airlines flap a couple of weeks ago. But I have discovered the medium's secret passion, the meme it loves even better than outrage and 'x-shaming'...

Schadenfreude. Twitter loves Schadenfreude. Fyre Festival is all about Schadenfreude.

The event has allowed literature buffs to display their erudition. Many, many references could be spotted to 'Lord of the Flies'. Fair enough: finally, all those millennials had a use for that book they had to read in school. I for one thoroughly enjoyed this JG Ballard pastiche, and I hope you will, too:

http://boingboing.net/2017/04/28/already-regretting-assigning-j.html

Personally, I don't think there IS a moral to Fyre Festival, but the resemblance of these people to clueless French aristocrats of the 1780s might yet prove me wrong...

I'm so glad Twitter brings me such insight and amusement, far from the scene of flying umbrellas and cheese-sandwich carnage.

There's something satisfying about the 'a fool and his money are soon parted' stories, especially when it affects the spoiled brats of the super-rich. And yes, the JG Ballard piece was priceless - thanks for that

It happens at the other end of the social spectrum, too. I'm reminded of folks who are regularly taken in by 'Winter Wonderland' events in the UK. These inevitably involve fake snow, and not nearly enough of it, a few penned-up, bored-looking reindeer, unrealistic Santas in term of physique, clothing and attitude, and chain-smoking elves. these cater for a clientele which can rapidly get violent when they realise they have been conned.

This article summaries the phenomenon, but there will be a few UK cultural references you may not get (Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen is a TV interior designer popular for doing cheap room make-overs in the 1990s, if that helps).

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/christmas/winter-blunderlands-putting-the-grot-into-grotto-9880733.html