THE SUNDAYS RANTS – The Great Data Grift, LockedIn Lunatics and the Death of Sense – 20260222

Host: (Neutral, slightly defeated Sunday presenter voice, think someone who’s already had three coffees and regrets it)

Panel: Smart Alex, George Melly, Yours Stewly, Mark Marx, Sir Afi

Set: Round table littered with half-drunk mugs, crumpled newspapers, a projector screen frozen on a particularly egregious 14-slide LockedIn carousel titled “Is Data Governance Dead? (Spoiler: No, But My Attention Span Is)”.

[Opening credits: jaunty-but-ironic brass theme that feels like it’s apologising for existing, exploding emoji icons]

Host: Good morning. Or afternoon. Or whenever you’re watching this on catch-up because you were too hungover to get up. Welcome to The Sundays Rants. Today, we’re discussing the absolute state of LockedIn, specifically the people who think posting five times a day about “AI-powered data stewardship” makes them important.

Our panel: Smart Alex, George Melly, Yours Stewly, Mark Marx, and Sir Afi.

Begin.

Smart Alex: [stands abruptly, jabs finger at camera]

RIGHT! These people! Fourteen-paragraph carousels! FOURTEEN! Each one longer than the Old Testament rewritten by a drunk algorithm! “Transform your BI with GenAI self-healing dashboards that achieve 100% trust!” Self-healing? What, like Wolverine but for bar charts? I’ve seen better healing from a plaster that’s been left in the rain for three weeks! And they’re charging £997 for a masterclass! A masterclass! In what? How to master the art of typing the word “synergy” seventeen times without vomiting? I once tried to read one of these carousels all the way through. I got to slide nine, and my eyes started bleeding! Actual blood! From my eyes! That’s how evil they are!

George Melly: (arms flailing, full Mel Brooks) Oy gevalt! “I saved a client ten million dollars in bad data costs, DM me for the secret sauce!” Secret sauce? It’s just Thousand Island dressing on a lie! Picture the movie: Young Frankenstein meets The Social Network meets a tax audit! “It’s alive! The data lake is alive! And it’s billing you monthly!”

Your’s Stewly: (long pause, stares at nothing, speaks very slowly and quietly at first) …so… these people… they post… five times a day… five… which is a lot… if you think about it… because most people… struggle to post once… without feeling slightly sick… but these people… they post five… and the algorithm… likes it… because the algorithm… is basically… a toddler… with a dopamine button… and every time someone says “This! ”… the toddler goes… “More! More!”… so they keep posting… and then… they sell you… a course… on how to post… five times a day… so you too… can be… an influencer… in the exciting world… of pretending… you understand… Power BI… when really… you just… copied someone else’s carousel… and changed… the font… to Comic Sans… because… irony… is dead… apparently.

Mark Marx: (leaning in, incredulous rage) What the actual f*** is going on?! They take every single workplace problem, slow decisions, inaccurate reports, people not using the bloody system, and they go: “That’s a governance failure!” No, it isn’t! It’s Karen in accounts still typing numbers into Excel like it’s 1997 and refusing to learn anything new because “the old way works”! And these consultants charge six figures to run “cultural transformation workshops” where you all sit in a circle pretending to be “data champions” while nothing changes except your bank balance!

Sir Afi: (rises slowly, adjusts imaginary visor, voice booming like a herald at a medieval tournament) Hear ye, hear ye, ye knaves and varlets of the digital realm! I, Sir Afilonius, Knight Errant of the Most Noble Order of Automatic Identification and Data Capture, do solemnly proclaim that these so-called “thought leaders” are nought but base-born mountebanks, peddling base tin for gold! They profane the sacred sigils of the bar code! They mock the eternal hum of the RFID tag! They dare to call a rainbow-vomiting dashboard adorned with forty-and-seven slicers a “masterpiece” when it is but a heretical tapestry woven from the threads of ignorance and conditional formatting gone mad!

[leans forward, voice dropping to a dramatic whisper]

I have ridden through the shadowed valleys of legacy systems where ETL pipelines lie broken and weeping. I have faced the dread Data Silo Dragon, whose breath is the stench of organisational politics and whose hoard is terabytes of untagged, unloved records! And yet these charlatans claim victory over the dragon with nought but a £5k “unified data lake” incantation and a carousel slide that reads “Unlock Hidden Value!” Hidden value? The only thing hidden is their shame!

[pounds fist on table, mugs rattle]

I challenge thee, emoji merchants and carousel conjurers! Produce thy verifiable DAX query! Show forth thy before-and-after lineage diagram that doth not collapse under its own contradictions! Or be cast into the Pit of Unread Whitepapers, where thine posts shall echo forever unanswered, save for the occasional bot saying “This!” in mockery!

Smart Alex: (interrupting, pacing furiously) And the dashboard porn! Oh God, the dashboard porn! “My latest Power BI masterpiece, thoughts?” Thoughts? My thoughts are: that is not a dashboard, that is a cry for help rendered in conditional formatting! Forty-seven slicers! It looks like someone threw a fruit machine down the stairs and filmed the aftermath! Pie charts so distorted they’re basically abstract expressionism with numbers! I saw one dashboard that had so much red-green colour coding it gave me a migraine and a political opinion at the same time!

Your’s Stewly: (another long pause, even slower) …and then… there’s the bit… where they say… “Governance is dead”… because AI… will replace it… and then… two posts later… they’re selling you… a governance framework… for the AI… that replaced governance… so… it’s not dead… it’s just… been promoted… to a higher form of… undead consultancy… like a vampire… that still does… Zoom calls… and sends follow-up emails… saying “just circling back”… on the death… of governance.

Sir Afi: (still standing, now gesturing grandly with both arms) Aye, and worse! They proclaim “Data is the new oil!”, a foul lie! Oil at least burns clean when refined! Their data is more like rancid chip fat left in the sun; it clogs the pipes, fouls the air, and attracts only vermin! Yet they bid thee hoard it in vast lakes, promising that one day an AI alchemist shall transmute base bytes into golden insight! Folly! The lake is but a cesspit, and their AI but a charlatan’s familiar, conjuring hallucinations and biased prophecies while the true stewards, those who toil at midnight reconciling duplicates, are ignored! (rises to full height, voice thundering)

I call upon this noble assembly to take up arms! Mute the false prophets! Block the emoji hordes! Report the vendors of vapourware! Demand proof, not vague testimonials writ by paid scribes, but hard lineage, clean metadata, and references thou mayst ring and speak with! Only then shall the realm of data be cleansed, and the feed restored to quiet virtue, where true knights post once a quarter with actual SQL and admit when their pipeline hath failed most spectacularly!

George Melly: (jumps in) Cut to the sequel: “LockedIn Strikes Back, The Empire of Bad Metrics”! The hero clicks refresh… nothing happens… the data’s still rubbish… roll credits!

Smart Alex: (rant peaking, almost screaming) And the AI stewards! “AI stewards will replace human governance!” Replace? They can’t even replace a lightbulb without hallucinating that it’s a conspiracy! I had a dream, an AI steward knocked on my door at 3 a.m. It said: “Your data lacks provenance!” I said: “Piss off, my data’s got more provenance than your entire family tree!” Then it tried to “self-heal” my browser history. My browser history fought back; it opened every tab I’d ever closed in shame! There were tabs from 2007! It was like being haunted by my own browser tabs!

Marx: It’s the same con as everything else, create the crisis, sell the solution, blame the workers when it fails.

Host: Right. Before we actually start a riot… final thoughts?Smart Alex: Block them. Block them all. Before they start charging us to breathe near their content.

George Melly: Make the parody. Call it “LockedIn: Men in Tights… of Data.”

Your’s Stewly: …just… stop… posting… please.

Mark Marx: Tax them. Heavily.

Sir Afi: (sits with solemn dignity) For king, country, clean metadata, and a feed untainted by fire emojis!

Host: That’s all from us. See you next Sunday, if LockedIn hasn’t turned us all into paid subscribers to someone’s “thought leadership journey” by then. Good morning.

[End credits: faint sound of Sir Afi still muttering “Verily… the bar code trembles…” over sarcastic brass sting and exploding pie-chart graphics]

Thank you for listening or reading.