I don’t think it was a huge swindle. I think the organizers actually thought they could pull it off without sufficient financing or without even remotely assessing the amount of work involved. They got in way over their heads. Then they doubled down and stuck to the their guns and went down with the ship (did I miss any analogies there)?
That is what makes it slightly funny and somewhat fascinating for me.
It is, as I mentioned earlier, like watching someone get up to do an oral presentation and realizing within a few minutes they didn’t prepare at all so they have to wing it. It is painful to watch but not without humor. It is a train wreck. You can’t not look.
So instead of being a way to swindle spoiled snapchat kids it was pure incompetence. Hubris. It was incompetence at an insane level and will be remembered as sort of a touch stone for anyone who ever has to deal with a millennial who is clueless. I happen to be a classroom teacher. I am not even remotely surprised this can or did happen.
We all know young adults that age. Is anyone here all that shocked that this happened? That people paid that kind of money to hang with models in a tropical paradise and not sense something wasn’t right? That the locals were not thrilled to see all these rich outsiders and take advantage of the situation? I love the Lord of the Flies and Hunger Game references. It reminds us all how close we are to starving or getting mugged kind of like after a major hurricane and the power goes out and you suddenly realize, without help, you basically have two days of food in the fridge and if you don’t manage that properly you might have to hunt in the woods to survive.
Crazy but funny as hell at the same time.