Sean Parker spent $5M on his wedding and all he got was a heap of Internet shaming

What do you do when you’re in a marrying frame of mind and have more money than God? You design a lavish multi-million-dollar nuptials ceremony that would make the royal family green with envy.

Certainly that’s what Sean Parker dreamed up when he retrofitted an old-growth redwood forest in the heart of Big Sur for a $5 milllion+ fantasy wedding to singer Alexandra Lenas earlier this month.

Parker, whose primary talent seems to be amazingly good timing, parlayed his early interest in Napster and Facebook into a fortune estimated in the billions, and by god he was determined to do more with it than merely snort cocaine off the torsos of Stanford coeds. (FYI, Parker says that scene in “The Social Network” was “complete fiction.”)

Lavish weddings are not unique in the world of high-tech insta-billionaires. When Bill married Melinda, he famously rented every helicopter on the island of Kauai so that the media couldn’t zoom in on the ceremony from above. Sergey Brin married Anne Wojcicki on a private island in the Bahamas. Larry Page did him one better by renting two private islands in the British Isles for his wedding.

A whole new level of excess

But Parker upped the ante. He set out to create an enchanted forest inside an actual forest, one that resembled “Lothlórien, the mythical home of Galadriel in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings.'” He brought in tractors to clear land, built fake stone bridges with a fake pond underneath, and erected a fake ruined castle. He managed to get it done despite not obtaining a single permit from the apparently “mysterious” California Coastal Commission, whom he later paid $2.5 million in penalties.

For all of that, Parker got soundly spanked by the media. Gee, what a surprise.

Yesterday, Parker posted a nearly 10,000-word rebuttal on TechCrunch. If his purpose was to convince the world he wasn’t just another spoiled self-obsessed technocrat with the prose style of a lovesick adolescent, he didn’t quite make it. Parker wrote:

After the ceremony many of us felt as though we never wanted to leave that forest, and indeed many guests remained there until the sun came up the next morning. We lay on the flower-strewn pathway, looking up at the redwood canopy above. The fog rolling in from the ocean enveloped us, imbuing the moment with a feeling of supernatural bliss….

We awoke that morning to a media backlash of epic proportions, a firestorm of press attacking our wedding with the most vitriolic language we’d ever seen in print. At the same time, a mob of Internet trolls, eco-zealots, and other angry folk from every corner of the Internet unleashed a fury of vulgar insults, flooding our email and Facebook pages.

These reactions were so extreme, so maniacal, so deeply drenched in expletives, they seemed wasted on us; this was the sort of angry invective normally reserved for genocidal dictators.

Poor Sean Parker. Like Pol Pot and Augusto Pinochet, he just can’t get no respect.

If you can get past the florid prose and abuse of quotation marks, Parker makes a good case that the media reports were a bit extreme. But he also misses the mark. For example, he claims his wedding caused no environmental damage to the forest at all, a point Gawker’s Sam Biddle vociferously disputes, quoting at length from the Commission’s post-ceremony environmental impact report.

He also offers a “slightly embarrassing confession” that his wife and he are “huge nerds,” then goes on to bemoan the current state of Web journalism:

Rather than basing their reporting on primary source material, the online tabloid press just piled onto the story, sourcing each other, and churning out increasingly sensational and exaggerated headlines as fast as they could type them. … Hundreds of reporters called exactly zero sources, asked exactly zero questions, did exactly zero research, and even managed to ignore the information contained in readily available public documents. In the fast-and-loose world of “blogging for dollars,” it probably feels like a waste of time to do original reporting when writing snarky stories with a paucity of facts is a more efficient way to generate traffic. Regardless, it was astonishing to see this volume of inaccurate, derivative stories written without any concern for fact checking or sourcing.

Who’s feeding the media monster?

Gee Sean, welcome to the Webbernets circa 2013, glad you could jon us. I guess you must be feeling kind of like those record companies felt back in 1999 when Napster allowed users to swap their music without contacting them first, eh? Disintermediation is a bitch.

Memo to Mr. Parker: When you can afford to hire the costume designer for the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy to help design your wedding, and the top elected officials in the state are on the guest list, and you blithely ignore the rules set up for the rest of us so that you can achieve your fantasies, and buy your way out of it later, you’re probably going to get a bit of blowback. When you call upon your pals at a tech blog to let you whine about it for 9,500 words, referring to yourself as a “rich guy” in quotation marks like you’re the member of an oppressed minority, you’re probably going to get some more.

And when you lecture us all, at great length, about the history of journalism and its current disintegrating state, aided and abetted by the sins of the social media monster you helped create, because your very public and rather farcical wedding wasn’t treated as “sacred,” well … you can fill in the rest.

Parker goes on (and on, and on):

Economically speaking, I profited handsomely from the destruction of the media as we knew it. The rest of the world did not make out so well, and society certainly got the worse end of the bargain. The decentralization of media got off to a promising start, but like so many other half-baked revolutions, it never fulfilled its early promise. In its present form, social media may be doing more harm than good.

If Parker thought he was somehow going to undo the damage to his not-exactly-sterling reputation by publishing this screed, he’s even more clueless than we thought. One of the commenters to the TechCrunch story summed it up for me: “You want a sacred wedding? Rent a friggin’ church.”

Afterward, please spare us the sermon.