It’s been nearly a year since Hulu and Netflix released their competing Fyre Festival documentaries, and sadly, the Fyre-related drama has slowed down. Billy McFarland is in prison, Ja Rule’s tweets are complete nonsense, and Andy King’s days of sucking dick for water seem to be behind him. But this week, the official Fyre Festival Instagram account popped back up in our timelines, and I’m confused, to say the least.
Gone are the photos of feral hogs in unnaturally blue water. Gone are the models hanging out on a boat. Instead, the account has been completely wiped clean, and rebranded with posts about… the fires in Australia. Over the past week, there have been 20 posts on the account, all about the devastation caused by the bushfires, and what we can do to help. So essentially, they’re now taking their name literally, and telling us all how we can help fight fires. Or fyres? Idk, something feels weird about this. Billy McFarland isn’t out here selling his nudes or anything, but it’s an unexpected turn of events nonetheless.
Originally, the Fyre Festival IG was shut down after the festival disaster, but it was reactivated in the wake of the documentaries last year. The account is being run by Oren Aks, the designer and social media strategist behind the original festival, who was featured prominently in the docs. The account hasn’t really been active in the last year, so the recent rebrand seems especially random. Like, can we not just let the Fyre Festival brand die? The bushfires are important, but literally every other person on Instagram has already posted about them, so I don’t think the Fyre Festival IG is really going to be the tipping point in saving the koalas.
All of these posts are especially weird considering that the bio of the account still says the “page is now an Internet archive.” That’s obviously not true anymore, now that all the original posts have been deleted (or archived). I kind of assumed the posts were still there for legal reasons or something—idk, is deleting Instagram posts like, tampering with evidence or something? Slide into my DMs if you’re a lawyer, I know nothing. Either way, it’s odd that the old posts are gone, but the bio of the account hasn’t been updated to include anything about the fyres fires. Oren should know that he needs to keep his message consistent, at the very least.
I’ll admit, I’m really curious to see if the Fyre Festival account continues with this new activism focus after caring about the fires stops being trendy. The post captions seem pretty in-depth, and not gimmicky at all, so the intent here does seem fairly genuine, even if it’s odd. I don’t know how busy Oren Aks is these days, but there’s literally always a new natural disaster to focus on, so this could just become their main thing?
Honestly, it’s probably only a matter of time before there’s like, a Fyre Festival Foundation or something, dedicated to fighting bushfires, and also probably paying off Billy McFarland’s legal bills. Even if Oren Aks is ostensibly the one behind all of this, I still can’t shake the feeling that Billy and his scammy energy must be involved in some way. A scammer is always gonna scam, and you KNOW Billy McFarland already has ideas for how to con people once he gets out of prison.
At this point, we really have no idea where this Fyre Festival rebrand is headed, or if there’s some ulterior motive, but you bet I’m going to turn on post notifications for this sh*t until we find out. As tired as this sh*t makes me, I hope the Fyre Festival never truly dies. And also, go donate to help fight the fires.
Images: fyrefestival (3) / Instagram
