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How does it compare on that score to The Illuminatus Trilogy[1], written more than a decade before Eco's book?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminatus

Robin Hobb books (with special mention of the farseer trilogy), Neal Stephenson, Alan Moore, Terry Pratchett.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

Doing the experiments contained within some of his books will take you on a very rational, sensible journey to some very strange places, and may break parts of your worldview.

A lot of people have a hard time with it, considering it nonsense and giving up a fifth of the way through. I'd strongly suggest sticking with it. There is a reason is seems like nonsense and the reason is given at the end of the book - the whole purpose of all of it is to reprogram your brain. It's a journey worth taking.

[Edit] Both of them make Dan Brown look really, really unimpressive. If "The Da Vinci Code" is a vaguely thought-through concept aimed at general readers, "The Illuminatus! Trilogy" is an explosion in a conspiracy theory factory.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

* Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

* The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

* Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

* Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz

* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

* Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

* The Culture novels by Ian M. Banks

* Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

* Not a book, but Gene Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek shaped who I want to be and the world in which I prefer to live.

Although, I would say that it's hard to choose because just about everything I read changes me in some way. Here I've tried to stick to the ones that changed me for the better, rather than sending me off on an amusing if useless rabbit trail, e.g. Real Magic by Isaac Bonewitz, Illusions by Richard Bach, The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft's works.

The Psychedelics Experience by Peter Stafford

Pikhal by Alexander Shulgin

Acid Dreams by Lee and Shlain

The Illuminatus Trilogy by Shea and Wilson

Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes

The Archaic Revival by Terrence McKenna

The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman

That should get you started. Good luck, and have a safe trip.

Bands like the KLF were a huge part of my early 20's.

The entire "Andy Kaufman" method of turning society and the media into your own private playground always seemed like the highest form of humor to me.

I am beyond jealous of your experiences!

Are you about 90% of the way through? Yes. The book is written in a style to make it have the trappings of more depth than it actually has. I actually enjoy it that way and do not mean it as a criticism. (I also enjoyed the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is self-consciously written with somewhat similar motives.) Don't undersell yourself.

https://www.amazon.com/Illuminatus-Trilogy-Pyramid-Golden-Le...

Some related concepts:

1. Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, notes that an absolute requirement of an effective and healthy system is accurate feedback and information. Media which are indifferent to truth value, or which actively promote distortion (see Robert Proctor's term, agnotology), will actively harm the system.

2. Celine's 2nd law, and inversion. In Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, a character notes that "accurate information is possible only in a non-punishing situation". Its inverse is also true: acurate information is only possible when it is accuracy itself and ONLY accuracy which is rewarded. Academic publishing, in which paper output and journal selection is a gateway determinant of professional careers, would be an instance of this. Or the long skew of The Learning Channel from NASA-PBS educational co-production to Honey Boo-Boo broadcaster.

3. Paperclip Maximizer. "Don't be evil" isn't good enough. You've got to actively seek out good. Even a benign maximisation goal will, if not tempered by requirements to provide net benefit, lead to catastrophic results.

4. Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action" explains how and why small (but motivated) fringe groups can achieve goals directly opposed to the interests of far larger groups. This explains a great deal of market and political dysfunction.

5. A generalisation of Gresham's Law leads to the realisation that understanding of complex truths is itself expensive. It's also (Dunning-Kruger) beyond the capability of much of the population. This also has some rather dismal implications, though as William Ophuls notes, political theory based on the assumption that all the children can be above average ("the Lake Wobegon effect") are doomed. You dance with the dunce what brung ya.

Social media are being flagrantly self-serving and destructive.

I don't know whether they're hiding or gone, it doesn't seem like a movement that would be big on recruiting so who knows?..

I'm now taking a second pass through Unsong [1], simply because I enjoyed the first read so much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

[1] http://unsongbook.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

More recently I've been reading through Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder by Nassim Taleb, and while I'm not completely on board with everything he said (his assertions that academia contributed virtually nothing to the development of the computer rang particularly false to me, so some of his other assertions are similarly suspect), it is forcing me to think of how I can live my life in a way that is less susceptible to things outside of my control.

For example, I've been following cryptocurrencies quite a bit and have some 'skin in the game' there, and that field does seem to require some 'antifragile' thinking in order to weather its volatility.

The book seems to be particularly good if you want to get more into the entrepreneurial or creative mindset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague

Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery which expands greatly on a tiny section of Foucault's Pendulum. Eco's writing is extremely dense. Similar to Neal Stephenson, but with more of a literary flavor than a technogeek flavor. A nice way to balance out your reading if you find you are a bit too focused on modern technology.

I finally read Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. Early Internet and web culture was so deeply infused with RAW's ideas that the trilogy felt like one long déjà vu session. Lots of fun. RAW + Eco are a great antidote to taking conspiracy theories seriously, while having a ton of fun at the same time.

Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Wow. Since the release of the Blue Ant books, I've been telling people that Blue Ant is the place to start, as it updates a lot of the underlying themes of Sprawl for this decade. But Sprawl is still very current and relevant. If you read Sprawl during or before the dot-com bubble like I did, you probably focused on the prophetic internet stuff. If you read it again, you will find out that there is plenty more interesting stuff to feed your brain in Gibson's early novels.

The real innovation in the book was how freely they mixed and matched conspiracy theories from the left and right to turn them into a gigantic ur-conspiracy.