Cyborg and prosthetic technologies frame prominent posthumanist approaches to understanding the nature of race. But these frameworks struggle to accommodate the phenomena of racial passing and racial stationarity, and their posthumanist orientation blurs useful distinctions between racialized humans and their social contexts. We advocate, instead, a humanist approach to race, understanding racial hierarchy as an industrial technology.

And then we have the multiverse theory born of inflation, which is the most intriguing of them all because it connects to a viable theory of the early universe and provides a route to potential experimental verification. This is the multiverse that just might realize the dreams of our movies and the secret wishes of our hearts. This is the multiverse that we may find evidence for. This is the multiverse that just might be real.

The reason for this has to do with both hegemonic heteronormativity and math. Everything you do on a computer is secretly math, and that’s the trouble. The messiness of the “real” world and people’s shifting identities are rarely consistent with the sleek empiricism required to effectively do the math that is under the hood in computers. This is most obvious when it comes to the gender binary and binary representation in computer systems.