Considerations of Site Architecture; a practice-led research into the politics of web stacks.#

A website’s architecture is political.#

The Techno-Anarchist Wiki is the result of my ongoing practice and praxis-based research. A resource that serves as a test site for a technical web development practice that reflects an anarchist-left politic. These ideals stand against American imperialism and see the expansion and reliance on American closed source tech and cloud infrastructure such as AWS or ChatGPT as an imposition on our collective sovereignty and must be opposed.

This politic is embedded within my broader praxis-led research for my final thesis and embodies the conversations, contributions, experiences and politics I hear from radical left spaces within Naarm as considerations that are at the core of these groups and political movements.

Accessible Sustainable Resilient Collaborative

You will find documentation as per the sources and origins of these values, situated within broader historical politics and software on the wiki (http://wiki.unshittify.cc/docs/).

Modern Web Architecture#

To lay some groundwork for why web architecture is important is to lay the foundations of the history of the embedding of big-tech into the American state and their complicity with surveillance and genocide. When it comes to the designed and relied upon infrastructure for any web development for politically minded individuals or organisations it seems incompatible to rely on and contribute capital both in the form of data and operational costs to these big-tech companies.

In a recent New York Times article (Barnes & Frenkel, 2026), we see:

“The Pentagon had previously confirmed deals with Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI and Google. In addition, the Pentagon said it had reached deals with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, a start-up.” “These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an A.I.-first fighting force,” the Pentagon said in a statement.”

The American military industrial complex is not gated to Palantir; many of americas largest companies have long standing relationships with corprations and states around the world that actively work against ideals of the left. The internet itself has roots within the american state and

Modern web architecture typically relies on a range of these platforms and services, and I have built projects personally for Australian businesses as a developer that rely on these services for the entirety of the project. However, modern web architecture, server hosting, dockerised containers and incredibly cheap global access to cloud storage has its upsides. And the technical concepts and workflows that have emerged along the way can be gleaned and repurposed in new contexts.

The CMS (Content Management System) & Git#

Modern web architectures are stacks of data, applications, third party services, plugins, modules, etc… This section of web architecture is what Marek Poliks would describe as “The Fold” within the book “Exocapitalism” (Poliks & Trillo, 2025). This infinite world of ‘Software as a Service’ answering the needs of various different software stacks to be able to interoperate with each other or complete some task. Any given business has many of these interoperative layers and hence is additionally why I have chosen to not rely on WordPress. Previously I had worked for a company that probably had 20 of these proprietary interoperative layers, one for a chart, another for data, surveys, etc.

A CMS however is the centre of the web design world especially business facing web design. In simple terms, it places blog format articles in the hand of the client that then never has to see a line of code. All the while a developer has established rules and processes for layout, stylisation etc. so that the site automatically adapts to additional content. This system is very useful and provides access to non-technical contributors to make changes or add new content to a site. Therefore, I engaged in proceeding down the rabbit hole of open-source CMSs that could potentially suit my needs.

The following were requirements that I derived from the established values aforementioned.

Hosting agnostic: This means that we could move it between computers and do not have to rely on any specific provider for infrastructure.
FOSS: Here I will leverage a definition from contributors on Wikipedia: “Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that gives users the right to use, share, modify, and distribute the software” (Free and open-source software, 2026).
No AI: An abstaining from projects that push AI onto developers / users or leverage frontier models within their services. Contributable: A system that is open to contributions from anyone, open-source in its nature so it itself can be copied, modified or redistributed by anyone.
Low Compute Power: A sustainable architecture that does not draw unnecessary energy, that preferably can be run on low-compute devices, e-waste, old phones, laptops etc.

With these various considerations in mind it led to a specific design methodology where I have leveraged HUGO. This static site generator is the most efficient open source static site generator and stores the website in markdown that can be edited like a traditional document. I am then hosting the Hugo development files on Codeberg. Codeberg is a non-profit based in Europe. GitHub is a very useful tool as it means that anybody can contribute to open source code bases and work collaboratively, however GitHub is owned by the for-profit company aforementioned: Microsoft – as mentioned on the Software Freedom Conservancy site in their article ‘Give Up GitHub’ it makes a solid case for it – “However, as a proprietary, trade-secret tool, GitHub itself is the very opposite of FOSS. By contrast, Git was designed specifically to replace a proprietary tool (BitKeeper), and to make FOSS development distributed — using FOSS tools and without a centralized site.” (Give Up GitHub, n.d.).

This methodology of leveraging the open source file base system that allows contributors to be able to edit the contents of codebases is the core of my design, and at the bottom of every page you will find a link that I coded in myself from adapted code scraped on community forums for this exact use case. To be able to take the person viewing the site to a place where they can immediately contribute.

This site has served me to face the questions surrounding authenticity and to attribute the values of my research and politic and to embody them in my workflows; I created the site entirely on my laptop running completely free and open source software. This work is to set up a broader potential for hosting sites in the future or providing insight on hosting to people that share these political ideals. This stands as a solid step toward my broader praxis-based research of creating tooling and resources for broader communities, of aiming to be a humble contributor or help where I can. The site aims to serve as a resource to connect various political and technical resources and guides to those working on the same political lines and is directly open to contribution.

Bibliography Barnes, J. E., & Frenkel, S. (2026, May 1). Pentagon Makes Deals With A.I. Companies to Expand Classified Work. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/us/politics/pentagon-ai-companies-deals.html

Developing a live Hugo editior ( Self hosted )—Feature. (2025, February 17). HUGO. https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/developing-a-live-hugo-editior-self-hosted/53569

Free and open-source software. (2026). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Free_and_open-source_software&oldid=1354536049

Give Up GitHub—Software Freedom Conservancy. (n.d.). Retrieved June 5, 2026, from https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

Poliks, M., & Trillo, R. A. (2025). Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits. Becoming.

The world’s fastest framework for building websites. (n.d.). Retrieved June 5, 2026, from https://gohugo.io/