We often think of the internet as a "free" space where we share our stories, our photos, and our language. But in the age of Artificial Intelligence, the cloud has become a new frontier for extraction. Just as the land was once taken under the lie of Terra Nullius, our knowledge is now being mined to fuel machines that don't belong to us. Today, we are deconstructing Tool #6 of Babylon: Digital Colonialism and the Extraction of the Digital Flesh.

In Research Report #224, we identify Data as the "new whenua". Just as land was the primary asset of the 19th century, data is the raw material for the 21st-century economy. Global tech corporations practice Digital Colonialism by scraping Indigenous languages, art, and Whakapapa without consent to train Large Language Models (LLMs).

We conceptualise this unconsented data as Digital Flesh—a commodification of the ancestors that strips knowledge of its relational context and Mauri. This is a "Bad Explanation" that treats our culture as a dead resource rather than a living expression of our people. By removing the "Indigenous" from the training data, these algorithms act as a filter for automated erasure.

Have you ever wondered why, in our own home, we are often treated like "guests" who have to ask for permission to use our own water or manage our own land? It feels like the ground was shifted beneath our feet long before we were born. That is because it was. Today, we are deconstructing Tool #3 of Babylon: The Doctrine of Discovery, the foundational myth that tried to render our ancestors—and our very souls—invisible.

In Research Report #224, we identify the Doctrine of Discovery as the "metaphysical root" of colonisation. It started in the 15th century with Papal Bulls that gave European monarchs a "divine right" to invade and subdue any lands not ruled by Christians. This doctrine created the legal fiction of Terra Nullius—the idea that the land was "void" or "nobody’s land." 

This wasn't just a land grab; it was an ontological erasure. It posited that Indigenous peoples didn't have the "reason" or "sovereignty" required to own anything. In Taitokerau, this tool still lives in the way the Crown asserts "Radical Title" over our whenua, assuming ultimate ownership by default while we are forced to "claim" our customary rights.