For Bob, nothing was sacred and nothing was set in stone - except maybe the idea that fundamentalism is a dangerous dead end. Like Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, Robert Anton Wilson’s The New Inquisition seeks to rescue science from fundamentalist materialism, and the rest of us from the broader implications of this approach. It is at once a philosophical treatise and an act of cognitive defiance … His message is more important right now than it was when he wrote it. Our digital fundamentalists see human beings as an engineering problem to be solved. Behaviors and thoughts that do not conform to our algorithmically generated profiles are to be eliminated, and humans shepherded into the reality tunnels that obey the laws of rationality alone. We are right now being programmed by the very fundamental materialists RAW is warning us about on these pages.

• from Douglas Rushkoff’s Introduction to The New Inquisition