The Power of Maybes
Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:18th Sep '25
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This cutting-edge study brings together philosophy and design to explore predictive computational processes and looks to ‘uncertainty’ as a central, epistemic tool for facing algorithmic challenges.
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.
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) *
ISBN: 9781350377271
Dimensions: 238mm x 158mm x 18mm
Weight: 500g
176 pages