He says sometimes his peers in the Valley seem perfectly nice but then they will say something “I just can’t believe.” He cites Eric Schmidt’s comment on privacy on CNBC’s “Inside the Mind of Google” special in 2009, that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

“Really?” Mr. Lanier asks. “It does give me this feeling sometimes that something’s going wrong with our culture in Silicon Valley and maybe it’s just that thing of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, just losing perspective. Like Zuckerberg might think, ‘Well, I went around to a bunch of states and I ate barbecue and wrestled cattle so I’ve been around all kinds of people.’ But to have people who you respect and listen to have fundamentally different worldviews and question your core logic and think that you may be way off track, that’s a much harder thing to do. And there are people who can be very powerful and comfortable with that. I’ll mention one, whose name is Barack Obama.”

I ask Mr. Lanier about the sexual harassment and gender inequity problems roiling the Valley.

“Well, sometimes, I think there’s a kind of emerging new male jerk persona of the digital age, which would be some kind of a cross between the Uber guy and the pharma bro and maybe Milo Yiannopoulos and maybe Palmer Luckey and maybe Steve Bannon,” he says. “Because, there’s this sort of smug, superior, ‘I’ve got the levers of power, and I know better than you.’ It’s sort of this weird combination of a lot of power and a lot of insecurity at the same time.” He believes that Gamergate led to the alt right. “It was one of the feeders,” he says.

He talks about another personality that is emerging from the digital age.

“If you’re a mark of social media, if you’re being manipulated by it, one of the ways to tell is if there’s a certain kind of personality quality that overtakes you,” he says. “It’s been called the snowflake quality. People criticize liberal college kids who have it, but it’s exactly the same thing you see in Trump. It’s this kind of highly reactive, thin-skinned, outraged single-mindedness. I think one way to think of Trump, even though he is a con man and he is an actor and he’s a master manipulator and all that, in a sense he’s also a victim. I’ve met him a few times over 30 years. And what I think I see is someone who has moved from kind of a New York character who was in on his own joke to somebody who is completely freaked out and outraged and feeling like he is on the verge of a catastrophe every second. And so my theory about that is that he was ruined by social media.”

Mr. Lanier plays me a song he composed to cheer up his wife when she was going through cancer treatments, a Cuban-style charanga flute solo played on a Japanese shakuhachi — “which is a crazy-hard thing to do and I pulled it off.”

Then he confides his fear that one of his older cats, Loof, would have been a Trump supporter.

“Loof is the sweetest cat in the world but she’s really an anti-immigrant voter,” he says. “She did not like the idea of young cats coming here. She really didn’t want the change. She really felt like they ruined everything. And I must point out that the new kittens who came are black kittens. They appear to be Bombay cats. Loof is not in a basket of deplorables. She’s just in a basket of blankets.”