Jaron Lanier, best known as a humanist in Silicon Valley, also plays a pathological number of rare acoustic musical instruments, a malady he described in the New Yorker Magazine.  He has played with all kinds of people, like Les Claypool, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, T Bone Burnett, Sara Bareilles, Sean Lennon, Stanley Jordan, Will Calhoun, Harper Simon, Bill Frisell, and many others.  He has toured with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, 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 also writes for movies and TV and is currently making a movie with Natasha Lyonne.  He’s also a scientist and technologist, known for his work initiating the field of Virtual Reality (which he named) among other things.  He won a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE.   Wired named him one of the 25 most influential people in tech of the last 25 years, and there are other puffy things like that.  He has connected with the hip hop world in various ways over time, including making a video with Kwame a few years ago, and, back in the day, joining Jesse Jackson, KRS-One, and Q-Tip to defend hip hop from criticism at a mock trial at the Barbican in London.  He also makes jewelry and will probably be wearing too much of it this evening.