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Uses your device's built-in voice. Quality varies by system.
A book about systems that collapse has to accept that its own examples change. That's what I said on air this morning, on Cáigase de la cama with Fernanda Tapia, when I was explaining Cherán and stopped myself mid-sentence. "I use Cherán as an example, but that part needs updating. I finished writing it before..." and without turning off the mic, I went ahead and updated Kerala, Rojava, and the kibbutz too.
The interview is up on Acustik Noticias' channel. I've embedded it below in case you want to hear the whole thing. My segment starts at 36:20.
If the embedded player ignores the start-time parameter, my segment begins at 36:20. Show: Cáigase de la cama with Fernanda Tapia, on Acustik Noticias (1150 AM Mexico City, plus repeater stations across Mexico and the United States), Monday through Friday from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. (Mexico City time).
Fernanda asked me to sum up the thesis, and I answered with the line I want to preserve here without softening it:
"It's not THE proposal, it's A proposal for how I believe we could function."
That nuance matters to me because it separates me from an entire genre of books that promise the solution. Las Piedras No Mienten reviews twelve thousand years of systems that promised freedom and delivered collapse, and it closes with a Luddite Manifesto that serves as a framework of rules. A framework is not a promise. It's a place to start from, which is why Part V of the book is devoted to listing the problems that framework doesn't solve.
When Fernanda asked me where all this comes from, I told her a story I hadn't put in writing until now. At seven years old I started with the Time Life encyclopedia volumes, especially the history one, and with the Encyclopedia Britannica that was in the house. I didn't read them cover to cover. Not the Time Life, not the Britannica. I read whatever interested me at the time, and back then what interested me were the Vikings, the Hittites, and other ancient civilizations. A bit older, I came across Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings, all seven volumes, not as a gift but simply because they were sitting on the bookshelves at home. That saga about the fall of the Capetian dynasty in the fourteenth century got stuck in my head and never left. Forty years later I wrote a book that is, at bottom, the consequence of that reading. I didn't build the connection. It was there from the start.
On air, Fernanda introduced me as a "scientist of all things digital and AI." It's generous, but imprecise. I'm a systems engineer and operations executive. I write from inside the corporations I now criticize, not from outside them. And that, more than the credentials, is what I wanted to make clear.
As for why I'm self-publishing: publishing houses rejected the manuscript with a memorable line, "encyclopedias don't sell anymore." It's true, they don't sell anymore. It's also true that without encyclopedias you end up arguing on Twitter with people who didn't even read the synopsis. Since I had no interest in slimming the book down to fit the mold, I set up Stones Don't Lie Press as my own imprint and publish my work there. Over time, the idea is to open the catalog to other voices that publishing houses are shutting out for the same reason.
Göbekli Tepe, the summer board game, and a question from Fernanda
We talked about Göbekli Tepe. Twelve thousand years ago, in southern Anatolia, hunter-gatherers raised carved stone pillars seven meters tall. No agriculture, no city, no priestly class to credit for it. Someone coordinated dozens of people across generations to build something that put no food on the table, and the classic theories about why we cooperate fall short of explaining it. I devoted the first Stones Notebook, free and bilingual, to digging into the detail without overloading the main book.
I also told Fernanda about a gamified summer program I designed for my daughters. A points system, with levels and individual rewards, but with a joint component where the outcome depends on both of them contributing. Fernanda caught the point on her own, live: "it's not about pitting them against each other, they both end up winning." Exactly that, said in fewer words than I usually manage. That board game opens and closes La Cantera, the first policy paper I published this August, about turning the stipend from the Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro program into cooperative capital. The reason the board game works at the household scale, and the reason that same mechanism doesn't travel intact to the national scale, is exactly the kind of honesty a book about cooperation has to build into the text, not leave outside of it.
It was Fernanda who brought Teotihuacan into the conversation. Massive deforestation to produce lime, timber from surrounding towns exhausted, famine, civil war, collapse. What I told her, and want to repeat here unchanged, is that this specific case isn't in the book. What is in the book is the pattern. Extraction as an organizing form. The deferred cost that comes due once there's nothing left to extract. The form of extraction changes with the era. The earliest empires extracted human labor, medieval ones extracted tribute, modern ones extract attention, time, data, future debt. The mechanism changes. The pattern is identical.
When I explained the Luddite Manifesto, I summed it up in a phrase that caught her attention: "that's where I lay out the rules of the game, propose how we might function, and then criticize it." That "and then criticize it" is Part V of the book. A manifesto that doesn't come with its own self-critique is marketing dressed up in nice typography. An adult reader needs to know what doesn't work before deciding whether the rest is useful to them.
The living cases, updated
The book cites four living experiments in voluntary cooperation that were still standing when I finished writing it. All four have since shifted. On air I managed to say that Cherán had shifted and needed updating. I didn't have time to give figures and dates. Here they are.
Cherán, in Michoacán, still stands as an autonomy model. Self-defense against organized crime, the assembly, reforestation, fifteen years sustained. What changed is that on July 2, 2025, there was an armed attack that isn't in the book, because the book was closed before that happened. Cherán didn't fail. Its enemy changed methods. Community defense worked against open occupation. Against the targeted violence of a more professionalized cartel, the equation shifted. That doesn't invalidate the example — it forces us to qualify it.
Kerala. After years of unusual human-development results under the Left Democratic Front model, in April 2025 voters chose not to renew its mandate. The easy reading would be "democracy decided." The honest reading is that there were four years of fiscal strangulation from Modi's central government, with federal transfers dropping from 5.52 to 2.54 percent of the state's gross product. A subnational experiment can be choked out by decisions made at another level entirely. That structural condition never survives the summary version of the case.
Rojava. Between January and April 2026, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria was dismantled as a result of forced integration into the new post-Assad Syrian government and the withdrawal of the U.S. military presence. It wasn't an internal failure of the model. It was an external shock. It reinforces the pattern also illustrated by Cybersyn in Chile, Marinaleda in Spain, and the Mondragón cooperatives during the euro crisis. A cooperative experiment depends on the tolerance of its geopolitical surroundings, and that tolerance can be withdrawn without warning.
The kibbutz. The Israeli case has spent decades shifting away from collective ownership of labor toward the "renewed kibbutz" model, with differentiated wages and privatized services. What was once a community of labor has become a community of housing with shared services. It didn't disappear. It changed shape. And that metamorphosis is a data point for the book every bit as valuable as the original model.
That's why this post exists, and why it isn't a thank-you note. A printed book is a photograph. A living case is a film. When the photograph gets published, the film keeps rolling. Acknowledging that out loud, on air, with the host listening and the mic still on, was the least I could do. Writing it here, with the figures and dates, is the next step. I'll keep this tracking of the living cases updated in a dedicated space on the site — not as new footnotes to the book (those will go into the next edition) but as a public layer any reader can check. When something shifts again, it goes here first.
The full broadcast is on Acustik Noticias' YouTube channel. Thanks to Acustik Noticias and to Fernanda Tapia for the space, and for letting the half hour flow instead of forcing it into a format.
