Autobiography and testament

Youth: becoming a self-taught autodidact off the beaten path

My name is Hubert Tonneau, and I was born in 1968. I therefore did not live through May 68, but I am from the generation that experienced its educational consequences.

Around the age of 11, my cousin showed me one of the first programmable calculators (50 program steps!), and explained that with a slightly more powerful one, you could program it to play chess. I immediately wanted to understand how this was possible, obtained my first programmable calculator, then a microcomputer, and finally, as early as 1984, before even taking my baccalaureate exam, an IBM-XT, which I financed by developing a program to automate the management of a videocassette exchange system.
At the same time, the Cité de la Villette was created in Paris, and to fill its library, it bought and made available to the general public, more or less all the computing books of the time, unlike university libraries, which were not accessible to the general public.
All of this allowed me to learn programming as a self-taught autodidact, and to arrive at the university and then at the École normale supérieure with a very solid foundation, to the point that I was not at all impressed by what was presented to me there.

Pliant: the art of mastering complexity

I found programming languages very mediocre, and decided to write a new one, in a naive logic close to that of Alexandre Grothendieck in mathematics. This took me 15 years, 14 of which I spent finding nothing that satisfied me. Pliant was published in 1999, when I was 30 years old.
In the following years, I completed Pliant, naively assuming that its lack of dissemination was due to the absence of native libraries, thus gradually transforming it into the only complete computer system ever written by a single person. The key was mastering complexity: finding the right concepts rather than massifying the code. Looking back, I realize this initial intellectual training conditioned everything that followed.
I also wrote at that time the founding article explaining the non-syntactic meta-programming at the base of Pliant. Moreover, 25 years later, I have never encountered the slightest reasoned comment on this innovative concept.

Storga: computing at the service of practitioners

A few years later, Storga emerged, at first as a simple complementary tool to help us organize better. In those days, there were myself and my two first disciples. Storga developed significantly over 15 years. The company Copliant that we created, which became its raison d'être, gradually contradicted in practice the principles taught by institutions promoting innovative entrepreneurship and management.
This led us to question more and more the nature of humans and the irrationality of decision-makers, and to seek answers in psychology and sociology.

From capital to reason: an appropriate social organization

Thus, by the force of circumstances, I reached a clear formulation of what a human being is, based on modern science rather than on plausible introspection, around 2018. Following the thread of consequences arising from this vision, we eventually arrived at the general structure that a modern social organization should have. This led me to write and publish in 2019 the book From capital to reason. I was 50 years old at the time.
I am convinced today, although all forecasts remain highly uncertain, that the future of humanity, for a period of no more than a few hundred years, will end either with an inability to master — through an appropriate social organization — the technology that has gradually made us demi-gods, leading to the progressive destruction of our environment and an escalation of violence, or with the adoption of political systems close to those described in From capital to reason.

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

Realizing that the media microcosm was completely closed off to us, we decided in 2021 that I would ride a bicycle to meet real people directly. The first exchanges showed that these people wanted to start with the personal aspect before addressing the collective aspect covered in the book. This led to the creation of the present site What to do with your life, which reached maturity in 2025.
The goal I had set myself was to allow young people to campaign for a credible project rather than either retreating into an illusory individual path or merely putting pressure on politicians. However, I noticed in 2024 that since the beginning, I had only gathered a few disciples who share two characteristics: they are interested in the content, and have known me for several years. This means that my attempts to pass on a serious project to posterity, through significant dissemination as a result of my actions during my lifetime, will most likely remain fruitless.

Testament addressed to future generations

At this point, we enter the testament. To my knowledge, no significant work of political theory has been published throughout the entire 20th century. On the contrary, From capital to reason was deposited at the national archives, along with the approximately 80,000 other books published that year. For human critics, finding it in this mass is impossible, due to its volume and the fact that they are only humans 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 is based on very solid foundations and advances a considerable number of ideas ahead of their time at the time of its publication.
Therefore, From capital to reason will probably be discovered by historians using the new tools at their disposal.

What will be its effect once recognized as a major work? I have no idea, and I probably never will.
My testament ultimately boils down to: Your genetic heritage is not the end of the story; culture, through the resolute adoption of an appropriate social organization, can save you.

Go deeper

This article presents the major stages of the life of the person who built this site. The article 'Building the human sciences like mathematics' presents the main features of the method that was used, as well as the fields of the human sciences that were addressed.

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