Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #171 - The Number of The Beast
Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - The Number of The Beast
How do governments in your fantasy or scifi setting identify and keep track of their citizens ? Tell me a story !
As societies grew through history, the need for more complex names or identifiers grew with it. Early societies made do with a single personal name. By the Greek Classical age, the father's name or description of a key identifying characteristic was sometimes added to this as a kind of early surname to help distinguish cases where two people might have the same personal name.
The Italian tribes refined this to a proper forename and surname, which they passed on to the Romans (who added the gens, or tribe, to the names of patricians). By medieval times, at least in Europe, we were back to a single name with a trade or other distinguishing feature added when a peasant left his village (I know an old Welsh joke about that, but it's far too bad taste to put here...). Nobles, of course, got a family surname. This eventually became formalised into the naming system used across much of the Western world today.
But by the time of the late Industrial Revolution era, social changes meant governments needed more. With the introduction of unified income tax and state benefit systems, they were no longer dealing with hundreds or a few thousand people, they were dealing with millions. This led to the introduction of identifying numbers - national identity cards, driving license numbers, national insurance numbers and a whole host of other schemes. New, we've gone digital, and so have our identifying numbers. The most recent trends include facial recognition and proposals for implanted scannable or RFID chips, and all the other apparatus of the surveillance society. Fun !
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂