Fyre Festival

In late 2016 hundreds of models and influencers posted the same plain orange tile on Instagram on the same day, mostly without disclosing they had been paid. Thousands of people bought tickets to a luxury festival in the Bahamas on the strength of it. On arrival in April 2017 there were disaster-relief tents, no infrastructure and, in the image that defined the whole thing, a cheese sandwich in a polystyrene box.

It first appeared in 2017, during the platform era.

It is the moment the influencer economy's mechanics became visible to everybody at once, and it collapsed in real time on the same platform that had sold it — the attendees documented the failure on Instagram and Twitter faster than the organisers could respond. The cheese sandwich photograph is one of the most reproduced images of the decade.

Billy McFarland pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to six years and ordered to forfeit twenty-six million dollars; ticket holders eventually received settlement money. Two competing documentaries were released in the same week in 2019. Undisclosed paid promotion rules were tightened in several jurisdictions afterwards, largely because of this.