S06E10: How Colonial Law Shaped Modern Data Extraction

Clicking “I agree” can feel harmless until you hear what it echoes. We follow a striking thread from the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius to the digital present, where human attention and behavior are often treated as if they belong to no one, ready to be “discovered” and taken. Our guest, a mixed-heritage settler Mennonite and Taino scholar who teaches AI ethics and policy at Queen’s University, opens with a jarring comparison between colonial “terms of subjugation” and today’s terms of service agreements.From there, we map Data Nullius: the idea that platform capitalism converts lived experience into corporate assets by first making it legible. With Édouard Glissant as a guide, we dig into how Western “comprehension” can operate like seizure, reducing relationships into measurable objects. We connect papal bulls and Johnson v. McIntosh to the property grammar of res nullius and show how that grammar resurfaces when data becomes metadata, signals, and behavioral traces that AI systems can ingest.The conversation moves through the history of statistics and state counting, Quetelet’s “average man,” Galton’s ranking, WWII-era computing, and the rise of surveillance infrastructure. We also keep Indigenous resistance in view, including the right to opacity and community-forward governance like the OCAP principles, which predate many mainstream data protections. Finally, we confront modern data ownership fights around large language models, genomic data, privacy law, contract law, and the hypocrisy of platforms claiming “our data” while individuals are left with little real control.If this reframed how you think about data sovereignty, share the episode with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. What would meaningful consent and accountability look like to you?Support the showView the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org.  Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.