Clout drought

When Anna Wintour failed to extend a single Met Gala invite to anyone from Computer Weekly this year, she sent out a clear message to the entire world: tech is out.

We were left to only imagine what our resident influencers might have done with this year’s “camp” theme while these pretenders who’ve never even made the front page of The Observer stole their style.

Kim Kardashian’s wet-look silicon Mugler number was as obvious a nod to the WannaCry ransomware attack as it gets; Katy Perry represented the internet of things by dressing up as a sentient chandelier; and Billy Porter played with the concept of cloud storage by putting on a pair of wings and being lugged about in the air by a collection of reliable servers.

Our schadenfreude is real, then, over James Charles’ downfall, which occurred not long after he took up a place at the glitzy ball at the expense of, say, our very own Brian McKenna.

The beleaguered beauty vlogger lost considerable “clout” when Tati Westbrook, another titan of YouTube’s make-up guru ecosystem, officially “dragged” him for his undesirable conduct.

Millions have since unsubscribed from his channel, and we invite those former fans in search of less problematic retail gossip and Lady Gaga chat to subscribe to our Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast.