Colonialism has wrought great injustices across many indigenous people at the during the modern period. Maori exercise unique negotiating skills to productively engage with the power dynamics of colonialism and modernity. This dialogue between Te Haumoana White and Ruth Irwin illuminates the ongoing pressures of modernity and colonialism, unique Maori approaches to ownership, and a deep understanding of power and politics. This dialogue traces historic injustice and contemporary innovations that seek to resuscitate the landscape and the community in, through, and around modern legal and technological onto-epistemologies. At the cutting edge of contemporary technology, AI is using algorithms to aggregate and sift political communities online. Te Haumoana White’s insights on land, environment, people and law are reflected on the AI tendency to advocate for the manipulation of popular opinion in the aggregation of AI algorithms. The computer science community who advocate AI seem to have little understanding of political theory, political economics outside the tired and outdated neoliberal paradigm, nor how voice constitutes politics. Thus, Tegmark and others in the AI genre, tend to advocate a ‘benign dictatorship’ model, based on a combination of neoliberalism and algorithms that are vulnerable to exacerbation and manipulation of popularist trends.