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.

The Editorial Team

Here are the most important lessons you can learn from goodstrat.com. These are distilled from the site’s essays, blog posts, and strategic frameworks around data, governance, and technology.

By Melanie Rodham Jenkins

Reviewed by Afilonius Rex, for FT Weekend

Madrid, Monday 9th March 2026

In an era when wealth inequality feels like an intractable virus, Martyn Jones’s Revealing Wealth: Combatting Tax Evasion with Data, Political Will and Technology arrives as a potent antidote – or at least a blueprint for one. Published in 2025, this ambitious tome blends technical savvy with moral urgency, proposing a global “World Asset Register” (WAR) to unmask hidden fortunes. Jones, a data architecture veteran once hailed as one of the world’s top information experts, teams up with his alter ego, Afilonius Rex – a pseudonym for a collective of contrarian thinkers – to argue that technology can pierce the veil of offshore secrecy. But as Gillian Tett might observe, drawing from her anthropological lens on finance, this isn’t just about algorithms and databases; it’s about the cultural rituals of power, where the ultra-rich perform elaborate dances to evade civic duty, leaving the rest of us footing the bill.

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Sunday 7th March 2026

History has a peculiar habit of clearing its throat at inconvenient moments. Unfortunately, the present tends to respond by turning up the volume on cable news.

In an age where political discourse is conducted through rallies, retweets, and the occasional midnight proclamation on social media, one cannot help but wonder what the great minds of earlier centuries might make of it all. The phenomenon surrounding Donald Trump and the rallying cry of Make America Great Again (MAGA) has spilt far beyond the borders of the United States, casting a long and argumentative shadow across Europe and the broader international order. Nationalism, isolationism, suspicion of alliances, and the rhetorical targeting of those deemed “other” are hardly new ideas, but like vintage fashions and bad moustaches, they have returned with startling enthusiasm.

Trump’s Digital Assault: How the Far-Right Weaponises Social Media to Wage War on Europe and Democracy

By Elena Vasquez

The Guardian Angle, 9 March 2026

In the shadow of Trump’s second term, a toxic alliance between far-right extremism and social media algorithms is accelerating the erosion of democracy, not just in America, but across Europe. As recent analyses reveal, this isn’t mere happenstance; it’s a calculated siege on rational discourse, institutional trust, and transatlantic solidarity. Drawing from three incisive critiques on social media’s suppression of intellectual rigour, the extreme right’s manipulative tactics online, and Trump’s undeclared economic and military aggression against Europe, we can forge a clear antithesis to the far-right’s “free speech” facade and synthesise a roadmap for resistance. The stakes? Nothing less than reclaiming democracy from digital vermin.