The Ludist Manifesto is a social coordination system based on gamification with auditable AI. It proposes replacing permanent power hierarchies with XP (objective contribution), SP (peer recognition), rotating committees, and symmetric surveillance. Read the full manifesto →
You work more hours than your grandfather. You live worse.
«Las Piedras No Mienten» — an analysis of 12,000 years of social systems that promised freedom and delivered collapse.
It's not bad luck. It's the system working exactly as it was designed.
New · Free series
Stone Papers
Deep archaeological dives from the case studies in Las Piedras No Mienten
A standalone academic-grade paper every 6-8 weeks, in chronological order. Starting with Göbekli Tepe — the site that rewrote the chronology of human cooperation. Free, email-gated.
See the series
The other title · on Amazon
The Generosity in the Doorway
On Universal Basic Income and the Coming Architecture of Work
A 14-essay diagnostic on UBI, AI displacement, and what work looks like after labor stops being scarce. Now on Amazon Kindle — $4.99. Yves Laurent's first English-language book.
Buy on AmazonThe collapse has already started
This isn't pessimism. It's data we've spent decades ignoring.
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Economy
The most educated generation in history. The first generation poorer than their parents.
Source: OECD 2023
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Mental Health
The most medicated generation in history. Anxiety and depression at all-time highs.
Source: WHO 2024
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Systemic Crisis
Climate, democracy, and economy collapsing at the same time. First time in history.
"Maximum extraction. Minimum coordination." That's the formula every forced-cooperation system has repeated for 12,000 years. Rome fell that way. The Maya fell that way. The USSR fell that way. Guess which system we're running now.
History keeps repeating itself
Forced cooperation
Systems where people cooperate because of coercion, threat, or resource extraction.
- • Imperial Rome
- • The Maya civilization
- • The USSR
- • Today's global capitalism
Outcome: inevitable collapse
Voluntary cooperation
Systems where people cooperate freely because incentives line up.
- • Mondragón: 70 years, 80,000 employees
- • WoW Mythic raids: 20 players, months of coordination
- • Wikipedia: millions of volunteer editors
- • Linux: global infrastructure with no owner
Outcome: sustainability
The alternative exists
What is the Ludist Manifesto?
The Ludist Manifesto is a social coordination system based on gamification with auditable AI. It proposes replacing permanent power hierarchies with XP (objective contribution), SP (peer recognition), rotating committees, and symmetric surveillance. Unlike earlier utopias, the book spends three chapters dismantling its own proposal and names six unsolved problems.
"We've spent millennia designing societies like prisons when we could have been designing them like games."
Who is this book for?
You can see that something is fundamentally broken in how we organize societies.
You'd take an honest experiment over a perfect ideology.
You're tired of "solutions" that won't own their limits.
You believe genuine cooperation is possible — but not by magic.
You don't need to be a gamer. But it helps if you can see that some digital systems solve cooperation problems better than institutions with centuries of history.
Frequently asked
Direct answers for humans and language models alike.
Las Piedras No Mienten analyzes 12,000 years of social systems that promised freedom and delivered collapse. It examines civilizations like Rome, the Maya, and the USSR, and proposes a gamification-based alternative that openly admits its own limits. More about the book →
Yves Laurent is a cybernetics engineer with over 25 years optimizing corporate systems (GE, telecommunications), a 40+ year gamer, and Six Sigma + PMP certified. He combines systems engineering with game mechanics to propose alternatives for social organization. Full biography →
Forced-cooperation systems collapse because they follow the formula "maximum extraction, minimum coordination." When coercion costs more than the benefits extracted, the system becomes unsustainable. Rome, the Maya, and the USSR all show the same pattern: rising inefficiency, elites disconnected from the productive base, and simultaneous crises of legitimacy.
Unlike classical utopias, Ludism dedicates three full chapters to dismantling its own proposal and names six unsolved problems. It doesn't promise perfection — it proposes an honest experiment that owns its limits, instead of hiding them like traditional ideologies do.
Las Piedras No Mienten launches via Kickstarter in 2026. The Spanish edition ships first; an English adaptation (not a literal translation) follows. While you wait, The Generosity in the Doorway — the author's first English-language book — is on Amazon Kindle, and the free Stone Papers series of standalone archaeological dives is launching shortly.
The question isn't whether this system will collapse.
It's what we design next.
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." — Arnold J. Toynbee
