Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, Sunday 29th March 2026

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Have you noticed,  and of course you bloody have, unless you’ve been mainlining “AI-powered data stewardship” posts on LinkedIn like some sort of digitally lobotomised labrador,  how the entire edifice of 2026 feels like one long, meticulously stage-managed accident? Everything’s deliberate, they tell us. Deliberate capitalism. Deliberate leadership. Deliberate grift. Yet somehow the only thing that ever actually gets done deliberately is the slow, grinding erosion of anything resembling sense, solidarity, or a functioning brain cell that hasn’t been optimised for engagement.

Start with the LockedIn lunatics,  that glorious Sunday rant still echoing like a flat white thrown against a glass partition in a WeWork hellscape. There they are, these self-appointed stewards of the future, posting five, six, seven times a day about how they’re ethically herding data like it’s some sacred Highland cattle, while their actual contribution to humanity is a carousel slide that says “Synergising ethical AI ecosystems for stakeholder value” in 48-point Calibri. Great take, Kevin! Really disrupting the paradigm from your standing desk in a converted garage. It’s not thought leadership; it’s the death of sense, wearing a lanyard and calling itself a personal brand. These are the same people who’d turn a genuine skill into a vibe, a union into a “collaborative workspace,” and any actual criticism into an HR violation. The great data grift isn’t even hidden anymore ,  it’s just rebranded as stewardship so the lunatics feel important while the algorithm milks their desperation for another dopamine hit.

And what holds this carnival of corporate self-fellatio together? Agile at Scale, that Frankenstein’s monster of Scientology zeal, Vatican ceremony and middle-management quirk that The Guardian quite rightly identified as bullshit by design. Seven years on and they’re still at it: rigid adherence to “doing things deliberately,” delivered with the solemnity of a papal encyclical and the intellectual depth of a McKinsey slide deck that’s been left in the rain. “We must move fast and break things,  but only in a governed, scalable, stakeholder-aligned fashion, obviously.” Mate, if your methodology needs seventeen frameworks, a certified coach and a wall of Post-its just to decide where to put the coffee machine, it’s not agile,  it’s a cult with better KPIs. The Fundamentals in Focus panel saw through the Emperor’s new Scrum board: the question isn’t what “deliberate” means, it’s how this jargon-choked version of it becomes its own elegant downfall. Because right now it’s just another padlock on the cage, keeping the LockedIn lunatics locked in and anyone with a functioning memory of how normal humans used to build things safely outside the perimeter.

Then, naturally, the whole rotten structure is propped up by the social media platforms themselves,  those amoral, depraved, degenerate digital fiefdoms we tore into in Prometheus Unhinged. Facebook, LinkedIn, the rest of the shiny panopticons: they didn’t liberate discourse; they moved the landlord into the living room and started charging rent on your opinions. Profit over people, conformity over conscience, every scroll feeding the beast while the billionaires helicopter between Davos panels on “ethical innovation” and private regulatory capture sessions. It’s digital feudalism with better filters. The utopian promise of connection? Long since memory-holed. What’s left is a machine that fragments any potential for real anger into algorithmic rage-bait, ensures the only voices that cut through are the ones that don’t threaten the quarterly numbers, and turns former public squares into private shopping malls with particularly aggressive bouncers.

Look at the bitter unravelling of something as old and beautiful as the bond between Wales and Zionism,  that scripture-soaked sympathy of small nations, where the valleys rang with hymns and the Jordan seemed to flow through every chapel. Now? Just another timeline battleground for the bots and the grifters, where nuance gets ratio’d, history gets fact-checked into oblivion by people who think 140 characters is deep, and the misty, coal-dusted poetry of shared fire is drowned out by the endless ping of notifications. The platforms don’t debate; they dissolve. They take enduring human connections and turn them into content verticals.

And floating through the middle of this sequinned abyss is Martyn Bey’s Come In Pink,  that high-camp, queer picaresque odyssey through the fragility of postmodernity itself. A sentient pashmina narrating a drag revue in the ruins of meaning, sashaying between glitter and existential dread like it’s the only honest response left. Because Bey gets what the LinkedIn stewards and the Agile priests never will: the fragility isn’t in the ideas; it’s in the desperate pretence that any of this corporate or cultural edifice is solid. The novel knows the cracks are showing,  between the data grift and the cultural unravelling, between the feudal platforms and the death of actual honour in leadership. It’s witty, acerbic, profoundly humane, and it reminds you why the independent, awkward, non-branded voice still matters when everything else wants you to perform your little-optimised identity for the feed.

So here’s the Saturday scenario, laid bare and bleeding: a world of LockedIn lunatics peddling the great data grift from their ergonomic thrones; Agile cults enforcing deliberate bullshit like it’s holy writ; social media turning potential citizens into serfs in a billionaire’s castle; old bonds of history and identity souring in the acid bath of the timeline; and the whole postmodern disco ball wobbling on its last stiletto heel. The bastards have convinced half the population that this is progress,  that the grift is stewardship, the cult is strategy, the control is connection, the fragmentation is debate.

Well, bollocks to that.

Some of us still remember what ‘deliberate’ used to mean before it became a trademarked methodology. Some of us still remember what sense sounded like before it got optimised out of existence. And some of us are still capable of looking at the sequinned ruins and saying: fuck this noise. Let’s dance in the cracks anyway,  but on our own terms, with our own voices, without a terms-of-service agreement or a performance metric attached. The platforms can keep their feudalism. The rest of us have a revolution to rehearse, preferably somewhere the algorithm can’t reach.

Many thanks for reading.