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.

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.