The Power of Maybes

Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures

Betti Marenko author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publishing:18th Sep '25

£85.00

This title is due to be published on 18th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

The Power of Maybes cover

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.

ISBN: 9781350377271

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

176 pages