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 and 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, Marenko argues for the cultivation of uncertainty as a form 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, Marenkochallenges dystopian fears and utopian hopes about technology, and champions new ways of being. Through a transversal approach to uncertainty, futures, machines, design and power, she argues that an allyship with uncertainty is not only possible but necessary to build an alternative to the worst excesses of algorithmic governmentality. By treating uncertainty as a cosmic laboratory to resist the capture of potential and reimagine the encounter with machines, Marenko incites us to live with uncertainty by cultivating modes of knowing, being and resisting that use it as an ally.
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.
Dilnot, Clive: - Clive Dilnot is professor of Design Studies at Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA. Recent publications include Ethics? Design? (2005) and the text for Chris Killip: Pirelli Work (2007).
Marenko, Betti: - Betti Marenko is a transdisciplinary theorist, academic and educator working across process philosophies, design studies and critical technologies. She is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK, where she founded and directs the Hybrid Futures Lab, a transversal research initiative that focuses on developing speculative-pragmatic interventions at the intersection of philosophy, design, technology and future-crafting practices. She is also WRHI Appointed Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. With Marco Rozendaal and Will Odom, she co-edited Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Staszowski, Eduardo: - Eduardo Staszowski is associate professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design, and Director of the Parsons DESIS Lab, New York, USA. He is the co-editor of the Designing in Dark Times series and of the book Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury 2020).
Tassinari, Virginia: - Virginia Tassinari is Assistant Professor at LUCA School of Arts, Belgium, where she also founded the LUCA DESIS Lab; Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and a design researcher for Pantopicon, an Antwerp-based foresight and design studio. Her research areas are design and philosophy, with a specific focus on design for social innovation, participatory design and design activism.
