“Data is the last frontier of colonization,” Mahelona told me: The empires of old seized land from Indigenous communities and then forced them to buy it back, with new restrictive terms and services, if they wanted to regain ownership. “AI is just a land grab all over again. Big Tech likes to collect your data more or less for free—to build whatever they want to, whatever their endgame is—and then turn it around and sell it back to you as a service.”
