DECONSTRUCTING BABYLON #135 - OUR DATA, OUR FUTURE: KEEPING OUR STORIES SAFE

In our previous posts, we have looked at how the Babylonian system extracts our physical resources like timber and gold, and our financial resources through the "Leaky Bucket" economy. But there is a new frontier for the machine: our data. In the digital age, our stories, our voices, and even our whakapapa are being treated like "empty land" that anyone can walk onto and claim. In this post, we are looking at how to protect our digital heritage and reclaim our power in the online world.

The Research: Digital Colonialism

Research Report #224 identifies a modern version of an old problem: "Digital Colonialism." Just as the "Doctrine of Discovery" was used to claim land that already belonged to indigenous people, big tech companies today treat the internet like "Digital Terra Nullius" (empty land). They "scrape" our social media posts, our recorded kōrero, and our family photos to train their AI models and make massive profits, often without our consent or even our knowledge.

This is a new form of extraction. The system takes our "Digital Flesh" - our unique cultural data - and exports it to build tools that don't always understand or respect our values. When our stories are taken out of our hands, we lose the ability to tell them in our own way. We become products of the machine rather than the authors of our own future.