For "lay" people, Whitfield Diffie talked at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 1996 on the politics of communication, with Tim Berners-Lee in the audience.

This was one of the best talks I ever attended. The other was Lynn Conway describing how she applied her study of anthropology to initiating a revolution in VLSI design. I did not know or appreciate at the time how being a trans woman also informed her understanding of the revolutionary process.