The Power of Maybes

Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures

Online Access / Resources

The Power of Maybes

Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures

Online Access / Resources

Hardback ~~$115.00~~ $103.50 Paperback ~~$24.95~~ $22.45 Ebook (PDF) ~~$103.50~~ $82.80 Ebook (Epub & Mobi) ~~$103.50~~ $82.80

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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. Where machines seek to lock down knowledge, capture potential, dictate futures and foreclose possibilities, The Power of Maybes presents the radical idea that embracing uncertainty is essential in our age of planetary computation and offers ways of cultivating it as a form of resistance.

By reframing the unknown as a powerful resource, Marenko offers a bold approach to living and thinking alongside machines without surrendering to their grip. Blending philosophy, design and critical tech studies, it 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, The Power of Maybes is a guide to living with oceanic uncertainty-and finding power in it.

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	Sep 03 2026
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Pages	176
ISBN	9781350377318
Imprint	Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Dimensions	9 x 6 inches
Series	Beyond the Modern
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

A brilliant and inspiring philosophical manifesto for an open and inventive approach to design and being alive.

Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
A dazzling exploration of the themes of uncertainty, power, futures, and designs and their relation to the epistemic, epoch defining challenges of planetary computation and the automation of decision making.

Tiziana Terranova, author of Network Culture (2004) and After the Internet (2022)
Betti Marenko has created a striking meditation on openness, indeterminacy and the call of an imminent future for theorizing, as well as making and unmaking forms of human invention.

Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism (2017)