On any given weekday, a bunch of tech-savvy young queers from around the U.S. log into a Zoom meeting to look for jobs. Or complete passport applications. Or figure out how to leave the country or a region of it that they’re not feeling safe or seen in. Other times, they simply want to hang out with other neurodivergent friends who are trying to survive the collapse of an empire.
“The Multiverse is an anarchist learning collective of leftist revolutionary nerds who like to make stuff,” says Liz Howard, a computer science educator and founder of the Multiverse School, an online program that teaches technical literacy and community survival to people who have largely been exploited or ignored by the tech industry.
The daily job standup, a check-in where members look for work together, is one of its programs. The GTFO program, which Howard tells me has helped 700 people get their passports, is another. There’s also an open-source software class and a prompt engineering class and an agentic coding curriculum — all remote learning.
The Multiverse School’s teachers can teach you to code, how to build AI and how to do a lot of technologically advanced things that are above my pay grade to understand. That last part, about my pay grade, is crucial. “People who don’t know how to code have less money than people who know how to code,” Howard said in a recent reel. More specifically, software developers earned a median annual wage of $133,080 in 2024, nearly three times the $49,500 median for all U.S. workers, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
