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. The name comes from ludus, Latin for game, and has nothing to do with the Luddites or neo-Luddism. Read the full manifesto →
Yves Laurent · Stones Don't Lie Press
You work more hours
than your grandfather.
You live worse.
The Stones Don't Lie — an analysis of twelve thousand 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 The Stones Don't Lie
A new standalone paper whenever the next one is ready, in chronological order. Starting with Göbekli Tepe — the site that rewrote the chronology of human cooperation. Free, email-gated.
See the seriesThe other title · on Amazon
The Generosity in the Doorway
La Generosidad en el Umbral
On Universal Basic Income and the Coming Architecture of WorkA 14-essay diagnostic on UBI, AI displacement, and what work looks like after labor stops being scarce. Now on Amazon Kindle — $4.99 USD. 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.
💸
Economy
The most educated generation in history. The first generation poorer than their parents.
Source · OECD 2023
🧠
Mental health
The most medicated generation in history. Anxiety and depression at all-time highs.
Source · WHO 2024
🔥
Systemic crisis
Climate, democracy and the economy under pressure at the same time. It is not the first time. It is the pattern the book traces across twelve thousand years.
Thesis · The Stones Don't Lie
«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
Model A · always collapses
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
Model B · works
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. The name comes from ludus, Latin for game, and has nothing to do with the Luddites or neo-Luddism. Unlike earlier utopias, the book spends three chapters dismantling its own proposal and names the problems it does not solve.
Read the full Manifesto«We've spent millennia designing societies like prisons when we could have been designing them like games.»
Keep going with how to design a society that cooperates without being forced or what to read alongside the book.
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.
The Stones Don't Lie 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 French-Mexican author, cybernetics engineer and operations executive with twenty-five years inside corporations (GE-GXS, Mexicana de Aviación, Televisa, KOKORIO, Suggestic). He holds a master's in Data Science and PMP and Six Sigma Green Belt certifications, and has been a gamer for over forty years. He combines systems engineering with game mechanics to propose alternatives for social organization. He founded Stones Don't Lie Press. He is not affiliated with fashion or fragrance brands of similar name.
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 the problems it does not solve. It doesn't promise perfection — it proposes an honest experiment that owns its limits, instead of hiding them like traditional ideologies do.
The Stones Don't Lie is available as a Kindle eBook on Amazon — $9.99 USD. Buy now (redirects to the regional Amazon marketplace). The Spanish edition, Las Piedras No Mienten, is also on Kindle.
Meanwhile, The Generosity in the Doorway — the author's first English-language book — is already on Amazon Kindle, and the free Stone Papers series of standalone archaeological dives is starting with Göbekli Tepe.
No. The name comes from ludus, Latin for game, and has nothing to do with the Luddites or neo-Luddism. The proposal relies on auditable AI, several small open-source models with one task each, and the final word is always human.
The closing note
The question isn't whether this system will collapse.
It's what we design next.
«Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.»
