Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Sir Afilonius Rex and Lila de Alba
Madrid, Friday 1st May 2026
The arrival of May 1st, International Workers’ Day, is often framed through the sepia-toned lens of 19th-century industrialism: coal dust, steam whistles, and the clatter of the Spinning Jenny. Yet, to view Labour Day as a relic of the manufacturing age is to commit a grave anthropological and strategic error.
For the modern “knowledge class”, those architects of algorithms, curators of data, and high priests of information, May 1st is not a historical curiosity. It is a mirror. To celebrate it is to acknowledge that while our tools have shifted from the physical to the metaphysical, the structural dynamics of power, exhaustion, and civic duty remain unchanged.
Here are ten reasons why those who trade in bits and bytes should reclaim the spirit of May Day.
The Architecture of Insight: A Masterclass in the Corporate Built Environment
In the grand, sweeping narrative of global commerce, we have long obsessed over the movement of capital and the flux of labour. Yet, we have been curiously blind to the very stage upon which this drama unfolds: the corporate estate. In his magisterial new work, Building Insight: Data, Information and Advanced Analytics in Corporate Real Estate, Martyn Jones, a “whisperer of unruly data” with a pedigree that reads like a Cold War thriller, seeks to rectify this oversight.
Jones does not merely write about buildings; he writes about the architecture of information. For too long, Corporate Real Estate Management (CREM) has been the “insular, withdrawn, and conservative” sibling of the C-suite, left to its own devices in a fog of unaligned metadata and legacy spreadsheets. Jones shatters this complacency, arguing that in an era of hybrid work and radical transparency, the corporate estate must transition from a passive cost centre to a high-octane engine of strategic value.
The Triple Helix of Modern CREM
The brilliance of Building Insight lies in its refusal to treat real estate as a mere matter of bricks and mortar. Jones posits a “Triple Helix” of mastery required for the modern practitioner:
The Analytical Rigour: Jones demands a shift toward “genuine insight” through advanced analytics. This is not data for data’s sake, which he memorably dismisses as “noise with a suit on”, but a structural life-support system for decision-making. From IoT-driven occupancy sensors to BIM (Building Information Modelling), the goal is a “logic layer” that reconciles the physical and digital.
The Anthropological Lens: In a move that would delight the likes of Gillian Tett, Jones insists that CREM is fundamentally about anthropology, sociology, and psychology. To manage a workspace is to manage the “learnt behavior” of its inhabitants. He warns that ignoring the human “natives” in favour of a purely logical view of business is a “perilous” path that only breeds resistance.
The Ethical Imperative: Aligning with the grand sweeps of Paul Kennedy’s historical foresight, Jones anchors the future of the built environment in Agenda 2030. The intersection of CREM with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is not an elective; it is the new baseline for institutional resilience.
A Blueprint for the Future
Jones provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the “eighteen variations” of real estate management, but his focus remains resolutely on the Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) and the “Grand Central of Everything”, the data governance frameworks that prevent our invisible digital buildings from collapsing.
The book’s appendices are a masterclass in themselves, offering a “basket full of cases” and innovative performance measures that move beyond the crude metrics of the past. He challenges the “miracle that curiosity survives formal education” by urging a constant, restless questioning of the status quo.
Verdict
Martyn Jones has written a book that is, like the author himself, “a leek in a paella”, something that adds a necessary, sharp flavour to a complex dish. Building Insight is more than a manual; it is a manifesto for the “whisperers” who must now lead. For any leader who suspects that their most expensive asset, their physical footprint, is being managed by “carpet-baggers” rather than strategists, this is the essential map for the journey ahead.
It is a work of authority, innovation, and, above all, profound clarity. In the “still, small voice” of the schema, Jones has found the firm’s future.
Review: Building Insight: Data, Information and Advanced Analytics in Corporate Real Estate, by Martyn Jones
In the quiet corners of corporate life, far from the glamour of mergers, the drama of markets, or the mythology of founders, lies a function that quietly consumes billions: corporate real estate. Offices, campuses, warehouses, data centres, and laboratories. They are the stage sets on which modern organisations perform. Yet the management of this built world has often been treated as a back-office craft rather than a strategic discipline.
Gemma Esmerelda Jones, Sunday Madrid 15th March 2026
Building Insight: Data, Information and Advanced Analytics in Corporate Real Estate
In an era where corporate real estate management (CREM) is no longer a mere back-office function but a strategic lever for sustainability, efficiency and value creation, Martyn Jones’s Building Insight arrives as a timely manifesto. Drawing on decades of experience advising blue-chip firms from Adidas to Xerox, Jones, a Welshman based in Spain with a flair for data architecture, argues that CREM’s future lies in harnessing data, information and advanced analytics. This is not a dry textbook on property spreadsheets; rather, it is a thoughtful exploration of how insight can transform bricks-and-mortar decisions into competitive advantages. At a compact yet comprehensive length, the book bridges the gap between CREM practitioners and the broader C-suite, echoing the analytical rigour of industry journals while infusing a personal, almost anthropological lens on the field.
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.
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.
F*CK DATA MESH: A polemic against fashionable nonsense in the data economy
Alicia Altmann, The Middle Digital Review, Chicago, 5th March 2026.
In the technology industry, few phrases age faster than the latest architectural revolution. “Serverless”, “big data”, “blockchain”, each arrives with evangelical certainty before quietly settling into the background noise of enterprise IT. Into this cycle of hype steps Martyn Jones’s gleefully abrasive book, F*CK DATA MESH: The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge*. Its title alone signals that this is less a manual than a polemic: a sharply written protest against what the author sees as the fashionable amnesia of modern data discourse.
F*ck Data Mesh: Martyn Jones’s Hilarious Haymaker at Tech’s Data Delusions
Review by Bella Carmela, WiredWiredWired, Silicon Valley, Thursday 5th March 2026
In the hyper-connected, AI-obsessed circus of modern enterprise tech, where every startup pitches a “revolutionary” data paradigm like it’s the next iPhone, Martyn Jones drops a bomb: Fck Data Mesh*. Subtitled The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge, this 2025 manifesto isn’t your typical dry treatise on ETL pipelines or cloud migrations. It’s a rollicking, profane takedown of the industry’s sacred cows… Data Mesh, Lakehouses, and the endless hype cycle that turns solid data strategies into vaporware. Written with the acerbic wit of a Welsh data veteran who’s seen it all (from mainframes to metadata meltdowns), Jones channels the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson meets Dilbert, urging businesses to wake up before their next “transformative” initiative sinks another billion into the swamp.
For most of its life in information technology, bolloxology has carried the faint smell of intellectual fart-like embarrassment. Too academic for product teams. Too rigid for startups. Too slow for an industry trained to ship first and rationalise later. Too smelly. It promised machines that could understand the world, and delivered, instead, a generation of beautiful bullshit diagrams and very little working software.
By 2026, that judgement looks increasingly wrong. Not because bolloxology suddenly got better, but because everything else did, and in doing so, exposed a missing layer in modern computing: meaning.
Ontology Didn’t Fail. The World Just Wasn’t Ready.
For most of its life in information technology, ontology has carried the faint smell of intellectual embarrassment. Too academic for product teams. Too rigid for startups. Too slow for an industry trained to ship first and rationalise later. It promised machines that could understand the world—and delivered, instead, a generation of beautiful diagrams and very little working software.
By 2026, that judgement looks increasingly wrong. Not because ontology suddenly got better, but because everything else did—and in doing so, exposed a missing layer in modern computing: meaning.
Friends, Roman, Countryfolk! In an age where every tap on a screen, every fleeting glance at a smartwatch, and even the subtle rhythm of a resting pulse are silently collected as data, what does this immense and glittering digital mosaic reveal about our innermost selves and the selves we have yet to inhabit?
Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, 7th November 2025
Set theory is a branch of mathematics that studies sets, which are simply collections of things.
It was pioneered by Georg Cantor, a German mathematician, in the late 19th century. He introduced concepts such as infinite sets (sets that contain an endless number of elements) and cardinality (a concept that helps define the number of elements in a set). His work, initially controversial, revolutionised mathematics by providing a rigorous framework for understanding infinity despite facing personal and professional challenges.
This book is dedicated to the great, compassionate, and visionary individuals. They have profoundly shaped my political journey. They have also influenced how I understand the world. Their courage, integrity, and unwavering commitment to justice have inspired me and countless others. Their actions have made an indelible impact on the political landscape of recent times.
Causal analysis is the field of experimental design and statistics pertaining to establishing cause and effect. Typically, it involves establishing four elements: correlation, sequence in time (that is, causes must occur before their proposed effect), a plausible physical or information-theoretical mechanism for an observed effect to follow from a possible cause, and eliminating the possibility of common and alternative (“special”) causes. Such analysis usually involves one or more artificial or natural experiments.
