In this chapter I intentionally problematize popular ways of valuing research and shift registers for what we might expect to see when reading ‘research.’ Empirical research assemblages call researchers to inhabit diverse forms of radically different worlds. These worlds can profoundly dis-organize and re-distribute us as ethnographers and people. Often, communication across and within worlds relies on algorithmic forms of mediation or digital platforms. I contend that we need more academic work unpacking the politics of feeling like a failure in ethnographic fieldwork and exploring the complex agencies of research assemblages, which modulate the subjectivity of empirical researchers. I argue that digital agency is gendered and is part of the algorithmic worlds in which feminist digital researchers work. As such, we need to develop our own failure archives of the roles played by digital agency and digital failure in the production of experiences of failure in research assemblages.