cw editorial

What use are websites during a genocide? This has been on our minds as editors through the life cycle of this issue: we opened for submissions a month after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which continued apace as we corresponded with artists via the global network of undersea data cables that ferried our revisions back and forth. We are grateful to be able to publish the incredible work you see in this issue, one that took some time as the pressures of the offline world took precedence.

It’s a sustaining joy to be able to commune with talented minds who share our passion for a playful, creative web. But it feels at times like a fragile, small joy, preoccupied with pixels and kilobytes, dissonant from the raw pain endured by those in Gaza and the scale of coordinated policies and efforts of Israel and zionists to obfuscate a genocide in real-time.

How do we continue nurturing that small joy when the very technologies we centre our work around are simultaneously complicit in real-world violence and erasure? Mara Cavallaro writes that online structures and social media do not operate "outside the purview of geopolitics” but instead deliver “the latest reconstitution of this apartheid landscape. One cannot, and should not, be understood without the other."

We have attempted to acknowledge this inextricable link between the online and offline since the beginning of Crawlspace, recognising the deep-rooted origins of online and networked systems in colonialism, military activity and environmental destruction.

This link goes both ways; embedded power structures offline affect and direct the management of online spaces, but the internet remains an important vector of power and visibility, should it be wielded well.

Despite the best efforts of Meta and other imperialist tech companies to censor Palestinian solidarity on their platforms, the documented experiences of those in Gaza reach out to the world, a vital record and counterpoint to the Israeli propaganda perpetuated by most mainstream media institutions. This is in no small part due to the success of mutual aid funds channelling e-sims to Gaza, a movement which also relies on the amplification networks of social media.

A few months back, Houthi rebels protesting the occupation of Gaza sunk a commercial ship with links to Israel in the Red Sea, severing three undersea telecommunications cables in the process and disrupting internet traffic through the region. This reminds us that the internet is material – and as an economic vehicle it can be disrupted, its traffic directed against state and corporate sponsorship of injustice and towards Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS), solidarity, and a sense of global community.

Recognising the privilege of being able to publish at this time, we have each chosen to make personal donations on behalf of Crawlspace to the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network. We also wish to vocalise our support for the Palestinian international call for BDS, and pledge to refuse collaborating with or taking money from cultural institutions funded by the Israeli regime.

We hope you enjoy the websites in this issue, and that you join us in the pursuit of Palestinian freedom – from the river to the sea!

– Rory Green and Hannah Jenkins, co-editors