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, the work presents 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.
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.