Sevilla, 21st November 2026 – Friday, 6th March 2026
What countries in the world have a reputation for arrogance and ignorance?
Right, listen up, you lot. No country has a monopoly on being a complete arsehole or a walking brain donor, but let’s be honest, some nations keep winning the gold in the Arrogance Olympics and the Ignorance Paralympics like it’s their national sport. And they don’t even have to train for it – it’s just baked in, like the French with their bread or the Americans with their portion sizes.
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.
THE END OF HONOUR: FROM ABSURDITY TO GLOBAL THUGGERY
By Vanessa Bell, Madrid, 4th March 2026
In Martyn Jones’s The End of Honour: From Absurdity to Global Thuggery, a sprawling and impassioned jeremiad against the moral rot at the heart of contemporary geopolitics, the author diagnoses a profound crisis in the Western liberal order. Published in 2025, the book posits honour not as a quaint Victorian relic but as an indispensable strategic asset, the ethical scaffolding that once underpinned alliances, restrained imperial overreach, and lent credibility to diplomatic endeavours. Its erosion, Jones argues, has precipitated a descent into what he terms “global thuggery”: a world where power is exercised through naked coercion, transactional extortion, and the commodification of international relations into protection rackets. Drawing on an eclectic pantheon of thinkers, from Kant and Lao Tzu to Martin van Creveld and Paul Kennedy, Jones traces this decline from the triumphalism of the post-Cold War era, through the neoconservative adventurism of the Bush administration, to the brazen populism of Trump and his unlikely bedfellows, such as Elon Musk, whom Jones caricatures as a “Bond villain with broadband” fusing Silicon Valley libertarianism with demagogic excess.
THE END OF HONOUR: FROM ABSURDITY TO GLOBAL THUGGERY
By Virginia Stephens, Madrid, 4th March 2026
History, as Paul Kennedy observed in the pages that mapped the rise and fall of the great powers, does not announce its turning points with fanfare. It discloses them, reluctantly, through the accumulated weight of institutional decay, strategic overreach, and, most damningly, the erosion of the codes of conduct that once constrained even the most ruthless of statecraft. Martyn Jones, in this sprawling, ferocious, and occasionally magnificent polemic, has written something that Kennedy’s tradition demands we take seriously: a diagnosis of civilisational decline rooted not in balance-of-payments deficits or military overextension alone, but in the collapse of honour as an operational principle of governance.
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.
The Universal Compass: Why Morality Transcends the Partisan Divide (With a Touch of Martyn Jones’s Slow-Burn Scepticism and a Proper Welsh Understated Grin)
Look, I’m not saying I’ve cracked the code to world peace or anything daft like that. However, morality, ethics, values, and principles don’t belong just to one side of the political spectrum. They’re not strictly red or blue. They’re like that jumper your mam keeps in the drawer ”just in case.” It’s full of holes and a bit faded. It smells faintly of mothballs. But it still does the job whoever’s wearing it. And if it doesn’t quite fit, well, there’s always room to stretch it a bit.
