SOCIAL MEDIA: Prometheus Unhinged – Social Media Is Amoral, Depraved and Degenerate

25 Wed Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment


Prometheus Unhinged – Social Media Is Amoral, Depraved and Degenerate

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid Wednesday 25th February 2026

Martyn Jones: Welcome to this week’s In The Frame, brought to you by the BBC, TVG, ETB, RTVE, NRD, CNN, S4C, FT Weekend and RTE.

This week’s panel consists of Annie Tusk, senior correspondent at The Guardian, Sir Afilonius Rex, Jilly Penn, columnist of the Financial Times, Martyn Jones of Goodstrat, the highly respected Alice Sauzgatillo of Spain’s RTVE, the veteran great, King Larry, and Juliette Brioche of LeCanard Enchainé.

Our theme for today is centred on the promise and realities of social media, including LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Truth Social, BlueSky, and many more.

My first question goes to Sir Afilonius. Sir Afi, what, in your opinion, are the key differences between the promise of social media in terms of freedom, liberty, and democracy, and the present realities of companies such as X, Facebook, and Truth Social?

Continue reading →

STRAIGHT TALK: Agile at Scale is Bullshit by Design – The Guardian

24 Tue Feb 2026

Posted by in agile, agile@scale, All Data, Architecture, Assets, awareness, behaviour, business strategy, Creativity, Dogma, IT strategy, Strategy, structured intellectual capital, Value

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Wednesday 25th February 2026.

Seven years on, the verdict is in, and it’s not flattering. Back in 2019, in a Brussels-fuelled rant channelling the incomparable Bob Hoffman, I declared Agile at Scale the next frontier of IT bullshit: immature, ill-conceived, supercilious, and emphatically not agile. It killed communication with jargon, turned criticism into heresy, and mangled history by ignoring what actually worked. I called it a cultish Frankenstein of Scientology zeal, Vatican pomp, and authoritarian quirks – all wrapped in vainglorious slide decks.

Continue reading →

VALUES & PRINCIPLES: Fundamentals in Focus – Doing Things Deliberately – 2026/02/25

24 Tue Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment


Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, Wednesday 25th February 2026

Sir Afilonius Rex: Welcome to this week’s Fundamentals in Focus, brought to you by the BBC, RTVE, NRD, CNN, S4C, FT Weekend and RTE.

This week’s panel consists of Annie Tusk, senior correspondent at The Guardian, Jilly Penn, columnist of the Financial Times, Martyn Jones of Goodstrat, the highly respected Alice Sauzgatillo of Spain’s RTVE, the veteran great, King Larry, and Juliette Brioche of Le Canard Enchainé.

The questions for today are:

  1. What do we mean by doing things deliberately?
  2. What should we mean by doing data deliberately?
  3. How can we ensure that rigid adherence to what we consider to be deliberate data capitalism is its downfall?
Continue reading →

THE SUNDAY RANT – The Great Data Grift, LockedIn Lunatics and the Death of Sense – Summary

24 Tue Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The Good Strat Board

Tuesday 24th February 2026

Right, so imagine this: it’s a Sunday in 2026, and somewhere in the digital equivalent of a greasy spoon café with flickering neon and a faint smell of burnt metadata, a group of data professionals has gathered round a table that’s less “round table discussion” and more “round table of the apocalypse”. They’ve had three coffees each, none of them decaf, and they’re absolutely livid about LinkedIn. Not the platform itself, you understand – though God knows it deserves it – but the absolute carnival of self-congratulatory lunacy that passes for “thought leadership” in the data world.

Continue reading →

STRAIGHT TALK: The Enduring Bond Between Wales and Zionism – and Its Bitter Unravelling

24 Tue Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The Enduring Bond Between Wales and Zionism – and Its Bitter Unravelling

Sir Afilonius Rex in Tel Aviv. Monday 24th February 2026.

In the misty valleys of Wales, where chapel bells once echoed with the thunder of Old Testament prophets, a profound affinity for Judaism and Zionism took root. This connection, woven from scripture, sympathy, and the shared fire of small nations, has long pulsed through Welsh history. It speaks in lyrical cadences, alliterative and incantatory, evoking green hills and golden psalms By that rolled like the sea in miners’ lungs. Here, the Bible burned brighter than coal seams; children learned of Jerusalem before their own rivers, with Jordan flowing through hymns and Zion a living heartbeat.

Continue reading →

THE SUNDAY RANT – The Great Data Grift, LockedIn Lunatics and the Death of Sense – 2026/02/22

22 Sun Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,


THE SUNDAYS RANTS – The Great Data Grift, LockedIn Lunatics and the Death of Sense – 20260222

THE EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

In this no-holds-barred Sunday roast, our battle-weary host and a panel of sharp-tongued data veterans, Smart Alex, George Melly, Yours Stewly, Mark Marx, and the indomitable Sir Afi, lay waste to the performative circus of LockedIn thought leadership. From endless 14-slide carousels promising “self-healing dashboards” and “100% trust” via GenAI, to £997 masterclasses in buzzword alchemy, over-caffeinated gurus flooding feeds with five daily posts about AI-powered stewardship, governance zombies, and rainbow-vomiting BI masterpieces, these self-appointed prophets are dissected with ruthless wit and medieval flair. Expect rants on hallucinating AI stewards, rancid data lakes masquerading as oil, cultural transformation workshops that change nothing but bank balances, and a clarion call to mute the emoji hordes, demand real DAX proofs, and reclaim feeds for quiet virtue over vapourware. A cathartic, coffee-fuelled takedown of the grift keeping data professionals scrolling in despair, because sometimes the only way to restore sense is to rant it back into existence.

Continue reading →

SOCIAL MEDIA: X Is Dying In Europe: Here’s Why – Revisited – 2026/02/16

16 Mon Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


http://www.goodstrat.com/books

X Is Dying In Europe: Here’s Why

I asked X about its massive losses in Europe.

“@grok, can you explain the massive drop in interactions in Europe with X?”

This is what Grok had to say and updated for today.

Continue reading →

STRAIGHT TALK: The Promised Banality of Evil – Revisited

16 Mon Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Sir Afilonius Rex

Tel Aviv, 16th February 2026

The relations between Wales, Judaism, and Zionism weave a tale as old as the hills. It is as tangled as the roots beneath them. These are threads of scripture, sympathy, small nations’ stubborn fire, and biblical thunder from the valleys. This comes to us in the voices of the past; lyrical, rhythmic, overflowing with vivid, swirling imagery. Alliteration and a bardic, almost incantatory prose describe the green and golden hills of Wales. The chapels rang with the thunder of prophets. The psalms rolled like the sea in the lungs of the miners. There, the Old Testament burned brighter than the coal seams! On those Nonconformist mornings, the children learned about Jerusalem. They learned their names even before their own rivers. Jordan flowed through the hymns. Zion was no distant dream but a living pulse in the blood.

Continue reading →

STRAIGHT TALK: Grok, What Do You Make of Martyn Rhisiart Jones’ Take on Big Data?

15 Sun Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


Sir Afilonius Rex,

London, 15th February 2026

Me: What do you make of Martyn Jones of goodstrat.com’s views on big data, are they correct, close or not true?

[Grok thought for a while]

Grok: Martyn Jones (of goodstrat.com) is one of the sharpest, most entertaining data contrarians out there. He’s been calling “Big Data” mostly bullshit since around 2014–2015, long before it became fashionable to say so. His Core Views (in his own blunt style): The whole 2010s Big Data circus (Hadoop, the 3Vs turned into 12 Vs including Vagueness, Vendibility, Vulgarity, etc.) was 80–90% vendor hype, consultant grift, and marketing snake oil.
Most companies didn’t (and still don’t) have Google/Facebook-scale problems. Chasing petabytes of unstructured social media noise often distracted companies. They were diverted from cleaning and using the high-value operational data they already had.

Continue reading →

CONSIDER THIS: In Praise of Shadow-Apps – 2026/02/16

15 Sun Feb 2026

Posted by in Inform, educate and entertain.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,


Here We Go Again!

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Oza-Cesuras, Sunday 15th February 2026

In the quiet underbelly of corporate life, sanctioned software often lags behind real needs. Shadow apps, which are unsanctioned tools employees adopt on their own, continue to flourish. Nowhere is their value more pronounced than in data analytics. Teams quietly sidestep lengthy procurement and rigid platforms. They harness spreadsheets, personal BI instances, open-source scripts, and cloud sandboxes. Far from mere rebellion, these shadow practices reveal institutional shortcomings while delivering tangible gains. Here are seven compelling advantages, viewed through a lens that values both ingenuity and measured reflection.

We asked seven highly engaged professionals for their top advantages of allowing Shadow Apps to thrive. We then requested comments from industry leaders. And here is what they told us.

Continue reading →