“Community Discussion: Digital Colonialism & Caribbean Futures.

In 1493, European powers utilized the legal fiction of terra nullius—nobody’s land—to claim sovereignty over the inhabited territories of the Caribbean. Five centuries later, a similar fiction is being constructed in the digital sphere. The "training data" that fuels the multi-billion-dollar generative AI economy is treated as data nullius: information belonging to no one, available for the taking. But this data is not neutral. It is the digitized sum of our human expression, our history, and our syncretic culture. And once again, the Caribbean is being positioned as a site of extraction. The engine driving this modern extraction is the United States doctrine of "Fair Use." While designed to balance American copyright interests, this law has metastasized into a tool of digital colonialism. Major AI laboratories in Silicon Valley scrape the open web—ingesting Caribbean news archives, literature, music, and academic repositories—claiming that this consumption is ...