The flagship, in English
The Stones Don't Lie
Twelve thousand years of forced-cooperation systems that promised freedom and delivered collapse. Ends with the Ludist Manifesto and its unsolved problems.
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A core part of The Stones Don't Lie
The Ludist
Manifesto
What if we designed societies the way we design the best multiplayer games?
Not utopia. An experimental proposal — with six specific elements, and the problems it does not solve.
What does “Ludist” mean?
Ludist comes from ludus, the Latin for game. The Manifesto is built from game mechanics for a reason that fits in one line: they are the only large-scale coordination systems in which people enter voluntarily and then refuse to leave. Luddite comes from Ned Ludd, who probably never existed, and it names a movement that broke machines with hammers. One is a design borrowed from play. The other was a strike carried out with sledgehammers and answered with troops.
From chapter 9 of The Stones Don't Lie.
What is the Ludist Manifesto?
The Ludist Manifesto is a specific proposal inside the book The Stones Don't Lie (Spanish original: Las Piedras No Mienten). It suggests designing social systems using principles from successful multiplayer games — Eve Online, FFXIV, World of Warcraft — combined with real-world voluntary-cooperation cases like Mondragón, Linux, and Rojava.
It proposes replacing forced-cooperation systems (capitalism, traditional socialism) with voluntary cooperation coordinated by auditable AI, transparent rules, and incentives aligned with the common good.
Why we need alternatives now
This isn't academic theory. The current system is collapsing.
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Economic crisis
The first generation poorer than their parents. More educated. More productive. Less access.
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Institutional crisis
Democracies that don't represent. Institutions that don't deliver. Trust at all-time lows.
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Simultaneous crisis
Climate, economy, geopolitics collapsing at once. First time in human history.
"The question isn't whether this system will collapse."
The question is: will we design the next one before or after the collapse?
The proposal in the book
The Manifesto develops six specific elements with documented cases.
What does work
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Voluntary cooperation — Rojava: 4 million people, horizontal governance since 2012, in a war zone.
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Aligned incentives — Eve Online: a virtual economy of millions of players, no runaway inflation.
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Auditable rules — Linux: 15,000 developers, open source, total transparency.
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Coordination without elites — Mondragón: 80,000 people, 70+ years, no traditional hierarchy.
The unsolved problems
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The AI Problem — The Manifesto depends on an AI that doesn't exist. It assumes capabilities the most heavily funded industry on the planet hasn't solved, and building on that is building on sand.
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The Goodhart Problem — When the metric becomes the target, it stops measuring what it measured. XP and SP can be gamed.
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The Scaling Problem — Coordination beyond Dunbar scale breaks down differently than coordination within it.
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Factions Are Inevitable — Groups form over nothing. And where everyone rates everyone, alliances aren't a flaw in the design but its expected behaviour.
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The Capture Problem — Rotation does stop blatant capture. What's left is subtler: the bias moves to which options get presented, and human judgement becomes a formality when questioning is costly and accepting is easy.
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The Fatigue Problem — The Swiss vote four times a year and average 45% turnout. It isn't apathy: informed participation competes with life, and loses.
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The Surveillance Problem — Symmetric transparency creates retaliation surfaces. Seeing everyone also means everyone sees you.
Core of the proposal
The six elements of the Manifesto
The book develops each element in detail:
1. XP (Experience Points)
Objective, verifiable contribution. Measurable data on what you add to the system.
2. SP (Social Points)
Subjective peer recognition. Your community decides it, not an algorithm.
3. Levels
Access to resources based on contribution. NEVER power over other people.
4. Auditable AI
Suggests decisions that anyone can verify. No general AI, only small, transparent models.
5. Rotating Committees
Temporary decisions. Mandatory rotation. No permanent power for anyone.
6. Transparent Surveillance
Symmetric, not asymmetric. «If you watch me, I watch you.»
How do they work? How are they implemented? What are the trade-offs? It's all in the book.
The six hypotheses it grows from · Reading that talks back to the Manifesto
Who decides, who appeals, who audits
The Manifesto doesn't leave the rules to the machine. This is what the book proposes so that no one, person or algorithm, gathers the power to decide out of sight.
Who sets what each contribution is worth?
People, not the AI. A legislative committee chosen by lottery, weighted by level and expertise and with required representation of regions and trades, proposes the rules in public sessions. No one serves a second year in a row, and if part of the community asks for it, the decision goes to a vote of everyone. The values in the book are illustrative and would need calibrating before any real use.
How do you appeal a decision?
Every decision comes with everything behind it, the data used, the rule applied and the calculation step by step. If someone thinks there's a mistake, they appeal to a judicial committee that reviews the evidence by hand and can reverse it. Decisions that affect many people can go to a vote of the whole community.
Who audits the AI?
The AI is several small, open-source models with one task each, never a general artificial intelligence. One model checks that the data supports each conclusion and, if it doesn't, sends it to human review. An audit committee, also chosen by lottery, reviews a sample of decisions by hand, and another model watches the human auditors for bias, with no power to change what they decide, only to alert the community. No model changes without a public review period, and any of them can be shut off at once. The final word is always human.
How all of this holds up in practice, and where it still falls short, is in the book.
Frequently asked about the Ludist Manifesto
Why design societies like games?
Successful multiplayer games solve coordination problems that legacy institutions can't: aligned incentives, voluntary participation, transparent rules, and an exit option. Their mechanics are testable, observable, and updatable in days — not centuries.
How does an algorithm replace governance?
It doesn't. Auditable AI suggests options based on objective data; rotating committees make the calls; symmetric surveillance keeps decisions accountable. Decisions aren't optimized — they're made transparently with their tradeoffs visible.
Why would this work where every utopia has failed?
It won't — at least not as a permanent solution. The Ludist Manifesto admits that every social system eventually collapses. It proposes one specific experimental alternative with metrics, fallback mechanisms, and an entire section of the book devoted to self-criticism.
How does it coexist with the current system?
The Manifesto proposes parallel experimentation: small communities, professional cooperatives, ephemeral DAOs. It doesn't depend on overthrowing anything. It depends on producing better-organized human cooperation than the existing institutional alternative.
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Honest
This system will also collapse.
Every human system collapses. Rome collapsed. The Indus Valley collapsed. The Maya collapsed. The USSR collapsed. Today's capitalism is collapsing.
The Ludist Manifesto is no different. It's one experimental proposal, not the permanent solution. That's why the book includes a whole section critiquing the Manifesto itself.
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
— Samuel Beckett
The Ludist Manifesto will fail. But failing better than the last one is already progress.
The six elements, in detail.
The problems, dissected.
A brutal critique of the proposed system.
It's all in The Stones Don't Lie.
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