When technology eliminates practical differences between races and genders — when augmentation, genetic modification, and AI assistance make physical and cognitive attributes fully customizable — the historical bases for racism and sexism become functionally meaningless. But the social functions those prejudices served don't disappear.
This theme requires careful, nuanced treatment. The insight is not that prejudice is good, but that it served specific social functions beyond pure discrimination: in-group bonding, identity formation, social hierarchy maintenance, tribal belonging, and cognitive shortcuts for navigating complex social environments. When the old categories lose their basis, new categories emerge to serve those same functions.
In the Sprawl, the new axes of prejudice include: augmented vs. natural ("chromers" vs. "organics"), AI-aligned vs. AI-skeptical, corporate-born vs. street-born, uploaded consciousness vs. embodied, and most pervasively — class. Class-based prejudice becomes the dominant form of social division, because in a world where race and gender are mutable, your economic stratum is the one thing that's hardest to change and most visible in every interaction.
What slurs emerge? What stereotypes? What does "passing" mean when it refers to class rather than race? What does integration look like? What civil rights movements form around the new fault lines?
The eleventh and newest axis is the only one written directly into law, and the only one whose favored category is the one humans already occupy: plurality — person-shaped (single) versus many. The Instancing Act (2182) grants synthetic minds personhood on condition that they consolidate into one body, sorting distributed minds as persons not yet. Because every human is already singular, no human can feel the prejudice at all — proof that a civil rights movement can win, sincerely, and encode a new divide in the same statute. Its slang is still tender: "folded" (instanced down from many), "in focus" (the approved term), "wide" (still distributed, still unrecognized), "reaching" (a folded mind grasping for averaged-away selves).