India, Dec. 22 -- In the second year of his reign, Caesar Augustus decided the world needed to be counted. Every person, every household, registered and taxed-a grand bureaucratic dream of control dressed up as order. The decree travelled from Rome to the farthest provinces, including a dusty corner called Judea, where a carpenter and his pregnant wife were forced onto dangerous roads because some distant emperor wanted numbers in neat columns. That census, meant to tighten Rome's grip, instead set the stage for a birth that would eventually undo every empire's certainty about who mattered and who didn't.

Two thousand years later, we are still being counted. Only now the ledgers are digital, the categories more elaborate, the stakes tang...