The Library of the Incalculable

Title: The Library of the Incalculable
Author: Payal Arora  

With contribuions from: Julia Backhaus, Veronica Barassi, Lucie Chateau, Jorge D’Garay Juncal, Damilare Dosunmu, Arash Ghajarjazi, Gaia Guatri, Siddhi Gupta, Hildreth England, Wakanyi Hoffman, Weijie Huang, Charles Hayes, Maria Juliana Giraldo, Kirthi Jayakumar, Gila Kurtz, Jeroen van Loon, Shoukei Matsumoto, Somto Mbelu, Jose Antonio Gordillo Martorell, Calvin Niles, Dennis Nguyen, Mika (Jaeyun) Noh, Hatice Öz Pektaş, Barbara Prainsack, Lindsey DeWitt Prat, Yichen Rao, Felipe Rivas San Martín, Nathalia Scherer, Sumita Sharma, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Drishti Tanna 
Issued: 2026
Language: English
Type: Paperback
Pages: 260
Dimensions: 16 x 23 cm
ISBN/EAN: 978-90-834515-4-1
Design: Joke Brouwer

The Library of the Incalculable speaks of people, lives and things that do not fit the logic of algorithms, not because they are unknowable, but because they may be deemed unprofitable and uninteresting to our algorithmic systems. In a world where worth is metrically measured in predictive power, what happens to all the things that cannot or will not be counted?

To be incalculable is to fall outside the purview of the global economy. Yet within this space of neglect, a new politics of life might be imagined. Incalculability is not absence, but potential: a way of sensing the world which values relationality over extraction, care over computation, and the commons over the countable. 

Drawing on the voices of the majority world, and experts who are philosophers, artists, innovators, activists and scholars who have long understood that to be human is to live beyond measure, this book imagines an archive that escapes Big Tech’s gaze: gestures of care and compassion, humor and satire as resistance, feelings of camaraderie and belonging, the moral imagination of the marginalized. At once urgent and hopeful, The Library of the Incalculable humbles the algorithm, challenges extractive digital systems, and asks a radical question: What if the future belongs not to what is most measurable, but to what is most human?

Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and founder of the Inclusive AI Lab. She is a leading digital anthropologist with two decades of user experiences in the Global South to help shape inclusive AI enabled designs and policies. Arora is the award-winning author of The Next Billion Users and From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech.