I once sat through a presentation by the statistics bureau of a mid-sized county. Nothing glamorous. Just a room full of charts and a guy in a rumpled suit clicking through slides. They track births, deaths, incomes, housing starts. "Data for better decisions," he said. Sounds harmless. Even noble. We need to know who's out there, what they need, how to build schools or roads or welfare nets. But as he droned on about population pyramids, migration flows, median household whatever, it hit me: this is herd counting. Pure and simple. Not for understanding people, but for managing them. Who's taxable? How much more can we wring out before they bolt? Which neighborhoods need "intervention" to boost compliance? It's the quiet engine of central planning. Aggregate the chaos of lives into neat spreadsheets, then engineer the outcomes. We buy the lie because it wears a white hat. "Knowledge is power," they say. "Evidence-based policy." Sure. Until you see the downstream: tax codes tuned to the decimals, subsidies herded toward "high-potential" zones, behaviors nudged via incentives that feel like choices. Freedom slips away in the uncounted gaps: the off-grid homesteads, cash deals, lives that don't ping the census. Those are the wild edges where real agency lives. The truly scary part was where he said that they interconnect mobile operator location data, civil registries and they ask neighbors. They know exactly how many people live where, down to individual level. "No KYC rental apartment" and no tax residency? Forget about it. They know, or will know.