About 5,500 years ago, humanity built one of its first great cities at Uruk—and immediately discovered bureaucracy. Farmers grew barley, workers got paid in beer, priests managed enormous institutions, merchants worried about supply chains, and somebody invented writing largely because somebody else needed to keep track of the inventory. We hadn’t figured out indoor plumbing, but apparently the quarterly barley report was already overdue. Five thousand years later, we have smartphones, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, but the basic operating system hasn’t changed much. Civilization arrived when we built cities, invented government, created taxes—and then invented paperwork to keep track of all three.