Lila de Alba

In the digital colosseum where data evangelists duel with dashboards and AI prophets peddle predictive panaceas, Martyn Jones arrives not with a sword, but a seltzer bottle. His latest tome, Laughing@Data.Com (self-published, 2025), is a riotous romp through the absurdities of the IT industry, a book that skewers the sacred cows of big data, machine learning, and that perennial favorite, “digital transformation,” with the precision of a Welsh coal miner’s pickaxe. Jones, a grizzled data architect who’s consulted for everyone from Adidas to the UN (and survived to tell the tale), channels the spirit of Swiftian satire into a manifesto that’s equal parts Wired’s gadget glee, CIO’s boardroom battle cry, and FT Weekend’s urbane eyebrow-raise. If Dave Trott’s advertising yarns met Stewart Lee’s stand-up scorn in a Zurich banker’s lounge, this would be the offspring: witty, worldly, and wonderfully wicked.

Picture this: Jones, born amid the Tolkien-esque valleys of Caerffili, Wales, where coal once fueled empires and now fuels his metaphors, sets out to dismantle the pantomime of IT. The book opens with a dedication to his dad, Karl Marx, and Pope Francis (a trio that alone warrants a cocktail toast), before diving into a biography that paints him as the “reluctant guru” who’s more structural engineer than Silicon shaman. From there, it’s a whirlwind of chapters tackling “Significant Challenges” in data, AI, business processes, and even the “Delayed Greening of IT”, a prescient jab at the sector’s carbon-guzzling hypocrisy, where data lakes evaporate faster than actual lakes in a heatwave. Jones doesn’t just critique; he cackles. Why laugh at data? Because, as he quips, it’s not “ha-ha funny,” but the hollow guffaw of watching a £4 million chatbot flounder on the word “help.”

What elevates Laughing@Data.Com beyond mere rant is its cultured contrarianism. Jones weaves in fairy tales of Welsh coal giants, nods to Kafkaesque scrums, and borrows from Homer Simpson’s prayers (“I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman”) to lampoon IT’s irrational excesses. He’s no Luddite, his expertise in master data management and fourth-gen warehouses shines through, but a pragmatist who demands “To what ends?” amid the buzzword blizzard. In one delicious section, he imagines outcome-based data projects where vendors share risks and rewards, turning hype merchants into accountable allies. Elsewhere, he mocks the “secrets of data success” with a Peter Cook-inspired skit, proving that plagiarism, when done with panache, can be a postmodern punchline.

For CIOs navigating the C-suite shark tank, this is essential reading: a sanity check against “cloud-native synergistic data fabrics” that sound profound but deliver zilch. Wired aficionados will relish the tech takedowns, like AI’s overpromise resembling a TED Talk wrapped in candy floss. And FT Weekend readers? Ah, the literary flair, Jones’s prose pirouettes from polemical to poignant, invoking Mark Twain on laughter as humanity’s weapon while dissecting the environmental sins of idle servers and porn-streaming data centers. It’s cultured without condescension, engaging like a dinner party debate where everyone’s had just enough Rioja to loosen tongues.

Of course, it’s not flawless. The book’s bloggy origins mean some chapters feel episodic, like LinkedIn posts strung together with Welsh wit, and the truncation in our review copy (a hefty 164,452 characters lopped off) leaves one craving the full feast. Yet that’s the charm: in an era of algorithmic overkill, Jones’s human-scale heresy is a breath of fresh air, or perhaps a gale-force guffaw.

In sum, Laughing@Data.Com is the antidote to IT’s self-serious stupor, a book that reminds us: data isn’t destiny, it’s a tool, often wielded by fools. Buy it for your boss, gift it to your data team, or read it alone with a dram of single malt. Just don’t expect to emerge unchanged, you’ll laugh, you’ll learn, and you might even question that next AI RFP. Highly recommended for anyone who’s ever eyed a Gartner quadrant and whispered, “Emperor’s new clothes?”