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Autobiography and will

Youth: becoming self-taught off the beaten track

My name is Hubert Tonneau, and I was born in 1968. So I did not experience May 68, but I am from the generation that suffered its educational consequences.

Around 11 years old, my cousin showed me one of the first programmable calculators (50 steps of programming!) and explained that with a slightly more powerful one, we could program playing chess. I instantly wanted to understand how this was possible, obtained my first programmable calculator, then a microcomputer, and finally, in 1984, even before passing my baccalaureate, an IBM-XT, financed by the fact of developing a program for automate the management of a video cassette exchange.
At the same time, the Cité de la Vilette in Paris was created, which to fill the library, purchased, and made available to the general public, more or less all the computer books of the time, unlike university libraries. which were not accessible to the general public.
All this allowed me to learn programming on my own, and arrive at the University then at the ENS with a very solid background, so that I was not at all impressed by what I was there. been presented.

Folding: the art of mastering complexity

I found the programming languages u200bu200bvery mediocre, and decided to write a new one, in a naive logic close to that of Alexandre Grothendieck in mathematics, which still took me 15 years, including 14 years to not finding anything satisfactory from my point of view. Pliant was published in 1999. I was 30 years old then.
In the years that followed, I completed Pliant, naively assuming that its non-distribution was due to the lack of native libraries, thus gradually transforming it into the only complete computer system written by a single person. The key was mastering complexity: finding the right concepts rather than massing the code. I see with hindsight that this initial intellectual training conditioned everything that followed.
At that time, I also wrote the founding article which explains the non-syntactic meta-programming underlying Pliant. However, I also note, 25 years later, that I have never been confronted with the slightest reasoned comment concerning this innovative concept.

Storga: IT at the service of operational staff

A few years later Storga emerged, initially a simple complementary tool to try to better organize ourselves. Among us, there was me, and my first two disciples. Storga has grown considerably over 15 years. The Copliant company that we had created, of which it became the raison d'être, gradually contradicted in practice the precepts that were taught to us in the organizations responsible for promoting innovative companies and management.
This has led us to increasingly question human nature, and the irrational side of decision-makers, and seek answers from psychology and sociology.

From capital to reason: an appropriate social organization

By force of circumstances, I thus ended up, around 2018, with the clear formulation of what a human is on the basis of modern science, and not simply plausible introspection. Following the thread of consequences that result from this vision, we have arrived at the general structure that a modern social organization should have. This led me to write, then publish in 2019, the book From capital to reason. I was 50 then.
I am convinced today, any prediction remaining highly risky, that the future of humanity on a scale of a few hundred years at most will result in: either an inability to control - via an appropriate social organization - the technology that has gradually made us demigods, leading to the progressive destruction of our environment and the escalation of violence, or the adoption of political systems close to that described in From capital to reason.

What to do with your life: an unexpurgated manual of the human condition

Seeing that the media microcosm was completely closed to us, we decided in 2021 that I would go by bike, to meet real people directly. The first discussions showed that these people wanted to start with the personal aspect before tackling the collective aspect covered in the book. This resulted in this site What to do with your life, reaching maturity in 2024.
The goal that I had set for myself in the meantime was to allow young people to campaign for a project instead of either falling back on an illusory individual path, or simply putting pressure on politicians. However, I notice in 2024 that since the beginning, I have only made rare disciples, who combine two characteristics: they are interested in the content, and they have worked with me for several years. This implies that my attempts to pass on to posterity a serious project, through a significant dissemination of the product of my action during my lifetime, will probably remain unsuccessful.

Testament for future generations

This is where we shift into the will. To my knowledge, no significant work of political theory was published throughout the 20th century. In contrast, From capital to reason was deposited in the National Archives, along with the approximately 80,000 other books published that year. For human critics to find him in this mass is impossible, because of the volume, and the fact that they are only men with the cultural limitations and prejudices of their time. Conversely, it is likely that in a few decades, search engines with text analysis will easily determine that this work, on the one hand, rests on very solid foundations, and on the other hand puts forward a considerable number of ideas in advance at the time of publication.
SO From capital to reason will probably be found by research historians thanks to the new tools at their disposal.

What will be its effect once recognized as a major work? I don't know, and probably never will.
So my will ultimately boils down to: Your genetic inheritance is not the end of the story; culture, through the resolute adoption of an appropriate social organization, can save you.