“The Algorithms are Us”: How We Should Really Be Thinking About AI

On Friday October 16, 2026, EverWind Fuels announced a partnership with American AI company Anthropic, who powers the AI chatbot Claude, for the construction of a $10-billion data center project in Point Tupper, Cape Breton. The project, set to begin phase one in 2027, would consist of an $8-million AI data center and a $2-million wind farm project. According to an EverWind Fuels interview with CTV, a 325-megawatt expansion is projected in mid-2028, which would bring the total energy demand of the project to 420 megawatts. The company’s founder Trent Vichie, who is based in New York, also claims that this project will create 2000 construction jobs and 215 permanent positions. EverWind Fuels has also been upfront about the project’s drawing of water from Landry Lake, which is currently used to provide water to Port Hawkesbury.  

The reaction to this news was explosive as thousands of Nova Scotians took to social media and the streets to protest and express their worries about this project. These concerns range from worries about the potential for water pollution, impacts on power bills, environmental impacts on the region’s biosphere, and a lack of public consultation before going ahead with the project. There has also been significant concerns about the links between Anthropic and Palantir, an American software company that builds analytics and AI platforms for the U.S. government and defense sectors. This relationship is particularly problematic as Palantir’s software has been linked with training protocols for I.C.E. agents in the recent immigration raids, and the company holds an active contract with the U.S. Department of Defense who has been under scrutiny for its ties to Israel. In a time where Canadians are encouraged to support other Canadian businesses and economies, it seems counterproductive to this national agenda to turn towards an American software company.  

Yet when talking to Dr. Riley Olstead, professor of sociology at StFX University, she offered a new way of thinking about the role of AI in our contemporary society. “AI data centers are not just buildings that house computers… [they’re] place[s] where global, digital ambitions become material demands on particular lands and water and energy systems and, of course, extraordinarily, more than human lives are involved in this” she says. Dr. Olstead argues that the debate being drawn up is in fact “a lot smaller than the questions that the situation is opening up.” While questions about the effects of data centers on environment and human lives are important questions to ask, they risk turning our gaze away from the colonialist circumstances that allow for this project to exist. “What if we ask something wider? What does this situation reveal about the bigger relationships that we’re living within? The relationships that make our lives possible here, and the relationships for which we have yet to take responsibility?” wonders Dr. Olstead.  

One of the things she notices when we talk about AI, is our tendency to think of it as existing in a cloud, untethered to the material world. “For me, the question is not simply about how much electricity or water the facility will use. Those questions are essential. But I believe we also need to ask what relationships are being reorganized to make this possible,” says Dr. Olstead. The main relationship at stake in this debate, she argues, is our relationship to settler colonialism. “Settler colonialism, of course, is not something that has happened in the past and it’s certainly not a label you can apply to other people…it’s shaping the institutions, assumptions, and our relationships through which we organize our lives, like this moment.” The key, Dr. Olstead argues, is understanding this project not as “an event…[but rather] part of an ongoing structure of which we are invested and involved in very ordinary ways.”  

Yet this problem is too often singularized in the media as a sole event within a swamp of other ecological and social problems. In my own research, very few media pieces or articles have tied our relationship to this data center with our relationship to colonialism, a phenomenon Dr. Olstead argues attempts to “distract us from the fact that everything else we do is also complicit in the harm that we might call colonialism.” The computer on which I am writing uses lithium and is plugged into an electrical grid that uses coal. The institutions that serve to educate and govern us exist on stolen land. Transportation sectors, mining, energy production and consumption are examples of many industries that form the foundation for colonialism and colonialist rhetoric. These same industries shape our relationships to the land and to each other. “We are not innocent,” says Dr. Olstead. “What if this data center, this moment in which it’s emerging, also became an invitation to examine how we learn to relate to the world and to one another?”  

For Dr. Olstead, it is important to recognize the ways that colonialism shapes our understanding of this crisis and to develop a response that works to reorient our policies and knowledge towards relational strategies. “Universities, including ours, are entangled in digital technologies…we use these systems, and we benefit from them, and increasingly, we are organizing our teaching and our research and our institutional life around them,” she argues. Thus, we can’t recognize our own complicity in upholding these colonialist values. We recognize the past and proclaim, “never again”, but when the institutions that govern our lives are entangled within a web of neocolonialist policies we simply repeat these same patterns with a different kind of violence: economic, political, or cultural, amongst others. “We settlers like to disentangle environmental degradation and climate change from colonialism. They are different words for the same processes,” says Dr. Olstead.  

So, the question becomes: how do we take these blinders off? “A single knowledge system, a colonial knowledge system, is not going to be adequate,” argues Dr. Olstead. Indigenous knowledge keepers have been pointing to the relationship between environmental degradation and colonialism for millennia, and this knowledge has largely been ignored or ridiculed. “The master’s tools are not going to dismantle the master’s house,” says Dr. Olstead, quoting the sociologist Audrey Lorde. “We are trained to think of ourselves as experts, and that we’re going to come up with technological and scientific quick fixes, or political fixes, as if our structures themselves live outside of the harm they produce.” What’s important, she believes, is “showing up because all of life is part of our responsibility, listening to the people who have had relationships with these unceded lands and territories that we all make our lives on.” The concerns we hold about AI, therefore, are not exaggerated or dramatic: there are very real fears and grief about the loss of our environment and uncertainty about our future. Yet we cannot afford to separate ourselves from our own complicity in these harms, no matter how easy it may be. The systems we live in and reproduce will not hear our grievances as long as they can divide us and profit off our lives. “AI is not outside of us: it is a mirror, it is us,” says Dr. Olstead. “It reproduces all of the structures of modernity. The algorithms are us.” Understanding our relationships to the world around us, she argues, and seeing ourselves as more than the good guys against the bad guys are key to “actually seeing what we’re doing.”