DECONSTRUCTING BABYLON #009 - DEFENDING THE DIGITAL WHENUA - STOPPING THE EXTRACTION OF DIGITAL FLESH🦎⚛️

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.