Hype

In the post-truth world, people let their emotions trick them.

Ads for the Fyre Festival first appeared on Instagram in December 2016. An amateurish commercial soon followed, forecasting an extravagant concert experience over two weekends in June 2017 for 10,000 people. The promos touted the festival’s $250,000 ticket packages and exclusive setting: a private island in the Bahamas, with a list of former owners including lawyers associated with cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. Organizers states that concert-goers would arrive by private jet, have access to yachts, meet fashion models, eat cuisine by famous chefs and sleep in luxury bungalows. Blink-182 – a band well past its prime – was named as the headliner. The slapdash nature of the promotional materials offered an early sign that a con was in the offing – so why did almost no one spot the scam?

A ready willingness to be conned – to buy tickets to the Fyre Festival, for example – is not a trait limited to generation Zers and millennials. This willingness is the signature of an era in which emotion-based information trumps evidence-based...