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.
Gaining this expertise, though, is the obstacle — and coding bootcamps promise a shortcut into tech for people who can’t afford the four-year degree. What they often deliver, though, is a different kind of debt trap — tuition that outlasts jobs that never come. Howard knows this from the inside. Over more than a decade, they built and ran coding programs at places like Galvanize, CodePath and Enki, a Duolingo-style app that has taught coding to roughly 2 million people.
Howard says the number of people like them — women, queers, gender nonconforming people — in the rooms where big tech decisions got made was minuscule. Howard was one of them. They watched who got funded, who got listened to, who got pushed out. Then they got pushed out. The pipeline to tech success, Howard came to understand, wasn’t broken. It was working exactly as intended.
Cassidy Barton, 42, a chief technical officer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, learned that lesson the hard way, too. He spent years in construction before AI reeled him back toward the tech dream he’d had since programming with his dad as a kid. He enrolled in the Multiverse’s engineering class in September 2024, and what he found there changed his life, including his day job.
Barton started using AI agents at the mechanical engineering firm he was working for, accomplishing in minutes what his colleagues had spent their whole careers learning to do. “I felt like the power that had been hidden behind paywalls of privilege had been removed for me,” Barton says.
The Multiverse School started as a distraction after a challenging breakup. “I was like, I’m going to go on the road and make a video a day because I’m sad,” Howard says. Videos became coaching sessions, coaching sessions became groups, groups became a school. This origin story isn’t incidental. It’s the methodology. Howard built something for people going through hard things because they were going through hard things.
Howard’s business model matches the mission. “We’re a communist business model,” Howard says. “Pay what you can. Nobody turned away for lack of funds. If you need a scholarship, just ask. We’ll say yes.” Sliding scale, $1 minimum. The curriculum is organized around survival and sovereignty, not just employment. According to the school’s impact report, the model sustains itself — sliding scale tuition from paying members subsidizes those who can’t.
Also, the programming is accessible to individuals who don’t fit the neurotypical mold. For example, when I checked out a class about AI agents, there were instructions about what to do if you start to feel manic during class, whether that means hyperfocus or something else that makes it feel challenging to process the instructions. I felt so seen.
Freeing yourself from the tech overlords isn’t just about saving money; it’s also about protecting privacy. “You don’t want to give Palantir all your data,” Howard says. “Cool. Let’s get open-source software on your computer and have less spyware on it. Slowly, slowly cut the cord.”
Barton knows exactly what that means in practice. When his wife noticed her period tracking app had served her an ad for menstrual cramp relief three days before her cycle, he started asking questions. “I was like, hold on, that’s just a calendar,” Barton says. “And then we looked into it, and it’s selling her data. In a post-Roe world, that’s a dangerous thing.”
So Barton’s team built an alternative: Cara, a free encrypted period-tracking app that lives on your phone, locks behind a screen and never phones home. His entire team came from the Multiverse.
“If we’re making friendships, nerdy friendships that produce something empowering, that give people agency, we’re hitting those needs. We’re stabilizing each other,” Howard says.
The GTFO program has helped people in unsafe places get their passports, navigate their options and understand the technology available to them. The job standup runs every weekday, not just to get people hired, but because, as Howard puts it, “every day till the Bell Riots start, we’re going to get up and look for jobs, because we all still have to pay rent.”
The reality is that many tech companies start out wanting to do good. After all, Google’s first unofficial tagline was, “Don’t be evil.” So how can anyone be sure that the Multiverse won’t become what it’s fighting against?
Howard has thought about that. They know that offering individuals empowerment often feeds a cult of personality, and they are committed to staying accountable. “If you show up in a place where people are starving and you have food, they love you. They’ll do anything for you,” Howard says. “It’s unethical to use that. That’s what cults are.”
That’s why the Multiverse School has a code of conduct, a mutual aid coordinator with social work training and, Howard says, people close to them with finely tuned noses for exploitation. “I’m just an autistic mom. I’m not very good at being an evil founder.”
The school’s invitation, it turns out, is practical rather than utopian. Howard isn’t asking anyone to believe in a better world. They’re asking people to show up on a video call that will help them deal with the world that we live in. “We’re trying to help regular, normal people get to the cutting edge of AI,” Howard says, “because it’s the only system that will help you learn it.”