Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier plays a pathological number of rare acoustic musical instruments, a malady he described in the New Yorker Magazine recently. Since the pandemic, he has played with Les Claypool, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, T Bone Burnett, Sara Bareilles, Sean Lennon, Stanley Jordan, Will Calhoun, Harper Simon, Bill Frisell, and many others. Before the pandemic, he played with tons of other people like Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman. He’s also a writer of books like You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. He’s won literary awards like the German Peace Prize for Books, one of the world’s highest lit honors. He’s that guy on Social Dilemma on Netflix. He’s also a scientist and technologist, known for his work initiating the field of Virtual Reality among other things. He won a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE. He’s also the Prime Scientist for Microsoft, against all odds, and has not won a Grammy.