The Power of Maybes

Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures

The Power of Maybes cover

Description

In a world of endless predictions and precision algorithms The Power of Maybes offers a daring new way forward.


What if uncertainty isn't a problem to solve, but a gift? This book reclaims hesitation, ambiguity, and not-knowing as powerful tools to resist the rigid control of digital systems. The Power of Maybes explores the radical idea that embracing uncertainty is essential in our age of planetary computation. Where machines seek to lock down knowledge, capture potential, dictate futures, and foreclose possibilities, The Power of Maybes argues for the cultivation of doubt, ambiguity, and un-knowing as forms of resistance.

By reframing the unknown as a powerful resource, The Power of Maybes presents a bold approach to living and thinking alongside machines without surrendering to their grip. Blending philosophy, design, and critical tech studies, The Power of Maybes challenges dystopian fears and utopian hopes about technology, and champions new ways of being open, ungridded, unscaled. It's a call to cultivate the unknown and nurture potential.

For those ready to reclaim their agency in an algorithmic age, this book is a guide to living with oceanic uncertainty -and finding power in it.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Adam Nocek
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Hybrid Futures
A Note on Method

Part I
1. Machines Work
2. Algorithmic Subjects
3. Resisting Reduction

Part II
4. Metic Wayfinding
5. Oceanic Uncertainty
6. Unknowing Stratagems

Conclusion: Whatever Designs

Bibliography
Index

Product details

Published 21 Aug 2025
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 176
ISBN 9781350377288
Imprint Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Series Beyond the Modern
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Betti Marenko

Betti Marenko is a transdisciplinary theorist, aca…

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