Anticipatory Failure: Sustaining Hope as Collective Care in

Digital Campaigning and Online Activist Spaces

Dr Heather McKnight,
Magnetic Ideals Collective

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Thank you very much for having me to speak on this roundtable. So first I’m going to read a
semi-creative piece that gives my basic account of failure to anticipatory failure and how they
relate. Then I am going to speak briefly about a piece of research and resource creation I was
collectively involved with in terms of anticipatory failure and online activist spaces.
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What is Failure?
Failure is when we break our own rules and fail to meet our own standards
Failure is when we fail to notice these rules standards are part of a collective construct
dependant on our shared experiences and interactions
Failure is sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, discriminatory economic practices, and
exclusionary language; failure is academia
Failure is where we forget who we are referencing, or cannot or do not try to recognise the
conditioned origination of what we are doing and saying
Failure is when we break from the guidance and fall short of expectations (of family, friends,
social groups, political groups, employers, the state etc.)
Failure is where we fail to notice the rules and act as if they do not exist, whether these are
written, unwritten or emergent as if in arising in intervention of the very act we are in the
process of undertaking.
Failure, as such, is impossible to avoid, as such we must embrace its possibility, how it can
prefigure something new through the destruction of our work, our confidence, or our
relations.
For many at this roundtable involved in current strike action, failure is when we have to
resort to a strike in the first place, for others it might be when we can’t afford to strike, or we
are too tired, ill or despondent to make it to the protest, or when we fail to engage with
people that pass by our pickets as their eyes glaze over…
Failure makes us precarious in the workplace, in relationships, in the home, it can render us
increasingly vulnerable, whether by making us visible or invisible
Failure is feminist, where the personal is political

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Failure is when we fail to meet a social norm; failure can be resistance, in fact some
resistance requires failure in its prefiguration
Failure becomes a utopian horizon when we stumble and fall, only to discover a new
perspective as we try to stand once more, or even see the sky as we roll over in compliance
Failure is when we risk doing things wrong to make things happen, to create change, because
we can manage no other way
Given the prevalence of failure, what does it mean to anticipate these failures as
we give words to them, as we share our failure?
When we anticipate failure collectively, it need not slow us down, or shut us out, but allow us
to know each other through mutual vulnerability.
To anticipate failure with each other is to trust each other, to anticipate failure is to be kind,
to anticipate failure is to learn, to teach, and not to assume.
To anticipate failure is to strive for collectively agreed rules and policies, visible and
malleable, to guide us as we can fail to share an understanding otherwise
To anticipate failure is the constant writing and rewriting the rules and tearing down the
expectations of these created rules and emerging norms as they fail to meet our new ideals
To anticipate failure is to be kind to each other because we all fail; to anticipate this failure is
to use that to allow failure to fortify and educate hope.
To anticipate failure is to ask about each other’s boundaries because we are strangers to each
other
To anticipate failure is to challenge each other without destroying each other, an ethics at the
edge of anxiety
To anticipate failure is to fail at anticipating failure as we constantly step into our own blind
spot.
To anticipate failure together is to voice our collective daydream as we try to intervene in an
imagined future, as social beings, workers, activists, as a connected species being.
In these dark times of climate crisis, the pandemic and many ongoing wars and genocides, to
anticipate failure is to hope, as it is to anticipate in we have a future, that we are still here to
fail and to anticipate.
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So, to return to the activist realm with this theory, I have recently been involved in creating a
PDF document called A digital carekit: Developing activist communities of care online1 with
Dr Audrey Verma and illustrator Griselda Gabriele. We met at an event Taking Care in the
Climate Crisis, where Dr Verma was very much taking the lead on presenting and looking for
collaborators, and the caring and collaborative process of writing this was a space of learning
for me and am indebted to both for being involved. It was felt there was a gap in resources
specifically targeted towards activism in the digital realm – so this was a starting point, not
an end point.
This carekit can be read as anticipating failure as outlined above and acting as a utopian
intervention for activists who use digital spaces for all or part of their work, which these days

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Available online here: http://www.magneticideals.org/home/resources/digital-carekit/

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seems to be most activists we encounter. When it comes to considering the how we
approached failure in the activist realm, which is increasingly prevalent, but which is not-yet
as fully critiqued as the physical space, we realised, we must anticipate new forms of failure.
I want end on SCRUM Manifesto I found online during my research, a small group of
feminist teachers at the Sorbonne in Paris, very much working on radical pedagogy.2
Sorcières pour un Changement Radical de l'Université Merdique – Witches for Radical
Change from Shitty University:
“We withdraw from the feeling of vertigo caused by the awareness of one's own
privileges. We enter them, to learn how to mobilize them, to use them, to share them.
Because if you can't demolish the master's house with the master's tools, you can
throw them in his face. We also learn to accept that the web can break. Reconfiguring
oneself without weakening oneself is a sine qua non for the complexity and the
etiolation of relationships. We learn as we go along not to let the discomfort of
disappointment, questioning, sadness, and we don't want to allow disappointment to
turn into cynicism.
We call on the mistake to rethink it. In front of the frustration and the discomfort
that the dominant violence carries in itself, we do not abandon the track but we
review the course.”3

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‘Hacking Practices in the University Space: The SCRUM Brigade – Rachele Borghi’ <https://racheleborghi-
com.translate.goog/index.php/pratiques-dhackerage-de-lespace-universitaire-la-brigade-
scrum/?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB&_x_tr_pto=sc&_x_tr_sch=http> accessed 2 February 2022.
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ibid.