
The Power of Maybes
Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures
Betti Marenko(Author)
Bloomsbury Visual Arts (Publisher)
Published on 18. September 2025
Book
Hardback
176 pages
978-1-350-37727-1 (ISBN)
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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) *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
503 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-350-37727-1 (9781350377271)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
08/2025
1st Edition
Bloomsbury Visual Arts
€94.49
Available for download

E-Book
08/2025
1st Edition
Bloomsbury Visual Arts
€94.49
Available for download
Person
Betti Marenko is a transdisciplinary theorist working at the intersection of process philosophies, design theory and critical technologies studies. She has co-edited Deleuze and Design (2015) and Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life (2021). Her work has been published in New Formations, Design and Culture, Design Studies, Digital Creativity and Technophany. She is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Content
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
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