Latest Stories from Jamie
Clown protests take Read Dead Online by storm
It’s been close to a year since Rockstar meaningfully expanded Red Dead Redemption 2, and players have started populating entire servers with clowns in protest. All is not well in the digital wild west. It’s been seven months since Red Dead Online’s ‘Moonshiners’ expansion dropped, and players are growing frustrated at the game’s lack of longevity. Rockstar revealed at the PlayStation 5 expo that it is currently gearing up to bring...
Chinese face-tracking tech bans foreigners from live streaming
A global inquest into TikTok has done little to deter China from pushing stricter censorship on its own soil. Official documents from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance have confirmed rumours that the viral video app is constantly running facial recognition technology to monitor and censor content on Douyin – China’s version of the platform. Douyin may appear innocuous on the surface, but Chinese streamers are subject to an intrusive regime of automated...
Challenger banks hit the spot with Gen Z
Like everything else with Gen Z, it appears the future of banking is entirely digital. But what exactly are challenger banks, and why are they so popular? There’s little doubt that the future of banking is headed towards a complete digital revamp akin to the shift in takeaway services like Just Eat and Deliveroo. A new wave of start-up companies have grown from quirky USPs into mega conglomerates over the...
Reddit must persist with alt-right purge despite ‘free speech’ concerns
Media efforts to combat hate is pressuring user-based platforms like Reddit and MeWe to follow suit, and rightly so. Since the 18th century we have used boycotting as a political weapon for good. In 1791 some 300,000 people abstained from buying any goods produced by slaves in the West Indies, demonstrating for the first time the undeniable influence of consumer action in bringing about tangible change. Today, with social media being...
NASA set to return to Mars with new rover ‘Perseverance’
Having bid farewell to the Mars rover in 2019, NASA is revisiting the Red Planet in 2021 with its most sophisticated vehicle to date, ‘Perseverance’. America’s chief space agency is set to embark on a new adventure to Mount Sharp, a huge summit on Mars, and the expedition will be carried out by a new and improved iteration of the 2019 rover called Perseverance. Dubbed the new rover’s ‘summer road trip’...
Mixer ends Ninja and Shroud contracts as Facebook partnership beckons
Microsoft is showing the door to its key Mixer streamers, but will its ballsy plot pay off in the long term? As we predicted back in January, 2020 is fast becoming the year for streaming services to really show their mettle. Whether it’s having a captive audience to target in lockdown, the nigh-on quarter increase in engagement for the likes of Twitch, record spikes in monthly
Manchester Utd’s Marcus Rashford wins campaign to bring meals to vulnerable children
The return to Premier League football is just round the corner, but Marcus Rashford’s biggest victory of 2020 has been secured away from the football pitch. The emergence of social media is fast erasing tired and sweeping views that professional athletes are 'dim' and ignorant to matters beyond their sport. Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling has done wonders for minority communities and combating racism in domestic and international football since 2019,...
Has BLM cemented the return of hacktivist group Anonymous?
After a decade in hiding, the familiar caricature of Guy Fawkes has re-emerged online and in the streets. But is this Anonymous as we once knew it? As we now know, the atrocity of the George Floyd story was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes racial injustice doled out by US authorities. In the States and the UK, tensions continue to run high as protesters push for...
BLM protesters weaponising memes against police
The weaponisation of memes is nothing new, but taking on anti-racism has to be its biggest and most significant engagement to date. Digital natives Gen Z are constantly shifting the parameters of political demonstration and discourse to include online spaces. Now a part of our everyday vernacular, memes are used to make light of serious subjects, to highlight hypocrisies or irony within current affairs, and generally to cause a bit of...
PS5 embraces the digital generation with discless console
Sony’s PS5 reveal delivered a host of new titles for fans to get excited about, but the big surprise came in the form of a new discless console dubbed the ‘Digital Edition’. For the most part, you’d have to call the PS5 reveal a resounding success for Sony. While one or two fan favourite franchises were absent from the event (cough God of War), fans were treated to first looks...
