Introduction: Hybrid Futures

Introduction: Hybrid Futures establishes the central proposition of The Power of Maybes: that uncertainty can become an ally for resisting the capture of potential by planetary computation and algorithmic governmentality. Bringing together philosophy, technology and design, it examines how predictive machines reshape knowledge, automate decision-making and constrain the open-endedness of futures.

The introduction develops the notion of maybes as radical contingency and undifferentiated potential, and proposes a cosmological orientation through which uncertainty can be inhabited as a condition of knowledge, existence and resistance. It frames hybrid futures as sites of encounter between knowns and unknowns, where difference, indeterminacy and transformation remain generative.

Positioning design as an ontological and political practice of world-making, the chapter calls for modes of engagement that resist technological determinism, reclaim the unknowability of futures and cultivate the possibility of living and designing otherwise.