Do narwhals and unicorns hide to die?

The sale of Montreal-based Element AI to Service Now Inc. in November 2020 took the Quebec and Canadian artificial intelligence ecosystem by surprise. How could the start-up achieve narwhal status—that of a Canadian company with a capitalization of more than a billion dollars—and be celebrated by the government, the media and the business community, only to be bought out a few years later “for a song”? In this article, we present the case of Element AI, including both its rise and its fall, as an ideal-typical “cyberization of power” in which regulation is facilitative, remote and able to perceive control and communication as two ends of a single feedback loop. While the quick emergence of Element AI is characterized by its quest for “super-credibility”, expressed through partnerships with authoritative actors and institutions, its collapse is the sign of a desynchronization which met with rebukes and contradictions, even from the government. We have much to learn from this shift from justification to criticism since it points towards a vacuum within the Montreal AI ecosystem, as well as its difficulty in projecting itself even into a near future.