11 Wednesday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
THE AFTERLIFE BRIEFING
(formerly titled The Saturday Scene*)*
Tagline:
Where history’s most troublesome minds return to review the week’s political disasters.
OPENING
Studio lights rise. Dramatic music that sounds suspiciously like a funeral march remixed for television.
Martyn Rhisiart Jones sits behind a polished desk.
Behind him, a giant screen flashes headlines:
WAR, SANCTIONS, DIPLOMACY, OUTRAGE, DENIAL
Seven historical figures sit around a circular table.
Continue reading10 Tuesday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
book-review, book-reviews, books, fiction, Philosophy, reading
Penelope Parker, Madrid 10th March 2026
The tech industry has long been a parade of expensive suits, hollow acronyms, and “digital transformations” that possess all the structural integrity of a damp Digestive biscuit. Into this landscape of algorithmic overpromise and professionalised grifting comes Martyn Jones with Laughing @ Data.Com, a book that, by all rights, should be required reading for anyone currently being held hostage by a Jira ticket.
Jones, a man once heralded as a top-tier database expert back “when that kind of accolade still meant something,” has produced a work that is less a technical manual and more a weary, satirical travelogue through the “Kafkaesque scrum of buzzwords and bootlickers” that defines modern IT.
Continue reading10 Tuesday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Rebecca Trentt
Book Review: Laughing@Data.Com by Martyn Jones
A survival manual for the data-industrial complex, delivered with a raised eyebrow and a sharpened knife
There are books about data. Then there are books written by people who have survived data.
Laughing@Data.Com sits firmly in the second category.
Martyn Jones’ latest contribution to the already groaning shelf of “data thought leadership” arrives like a heckler in a TED Talk. Where most books on artificial intelligence, analytics, and “digital transformation” read like a PowerPoint deck translated into prose, Jones offers something rarer: a long, irreverent laugh at the entire enterprise.
Not a joyful laugh, mind you. More the hollow, existential chuckle of someone who has spent thirty years watching corporations spend millions trying to discover that spreadsheets still work.
And that, in many ways, is the point.
Continue reading09 Monday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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.
Continue reading09 Monday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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.
08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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.
08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI, Artificial Intelligence, Business, finance, Marketing, science, social media, technology, trump
By Samantha Sterling Parker, Spanish FT Weekend
Madrid, Monday 9th March 2026
To say that Martyn Jones’s Revealing Wealth is merely a book about tax evasion is like saying the Large Hadron Collider is just a fancy pipe. This is a manifesto for a digital revolution, a technical blueprint for global equity, and a provocative call to arms that arrives just as the old financial order begins to crack.
Below is a look at this seminal work through three distinct editorial lenses.
Continue reading08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
By Samantha Sterling Parker, Long FT Weekend
Madrid, Monday 9th March 2026
Book Review: Revealing Wealth: Combatting Tax Evasion with Data, Political Will and Technology by Martyn Jones
In an age defined by algorithms, trillion-dollar tech companies, and data flowing across borders at the speed of light, one of the oldest problems in civilisation persists: how the wealthy avoid paying their share of tax. In Revealing Wealth, Martyn Jones argues that the real scandal is not simply that tax evasion exists, but that in a data-rich world we still allow it to thrive.
Continue reading08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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.
Continue reading08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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.
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