Editing Openai/696b7614-10bc-8006-b70d-5688055cda78 (section)

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Short answer: yes, but with stress fractures.

Long answer below.

==== ### ====

Popper’s core diagnosis—that open systems can be destroyed from inside by actors who exploit openness without believing in it—has aged extremely well.

What he identified in fascist movements now appears in:
* digital propaganda networks
* coordinated disinformation campaigns
* movements that reject dialogue while performing it tactically

The logic is the same; only the delivery mechanism changed.

Popper assumed:
* newspapers
* speeches
* parties

We now have:
* algorithmic amplification
* anonymous coordination
* global reach at near-zero cost

The attack surface exploded.

===== Popper’s distinction between: =====
* those willing to argue, and
* those who treat discourse as warfare

is arguably more relevant today than in 1945.

This maps almost perfectly onto:
* trolling
* harassment-as-strategy
* “flood the zone” tactics

Popper anticipated bad faith long before the term became common.

===== Popper’s insistence that: =====
* no authority owns truth
* error correction matters more than certainty

still underpins:
* science
* constitutional democracy
* journalism (in principle, if not always in practice)

This epistemic humility has not aged; it has become more necessary.

==== ### ====

Popper believed that:

: 

The 21st century suggests:
* attention beats argument
* repetition beats evidence
* emotional narratives beat falsifiability

This is not a refutation of Popper—it’s a constraint he underestimated.

Human cognition is not the ideal error-correcting machine Popper hoped for.

===== Popper imagined intolerance as: =====
* movements
* parties
* leaders

He did not imagine:
* bot swarms
* deepfakes
* AI-generated persuasion at scale

The paradox of tolerance becomes harder when:
* the “speaker” is not a person
* intent is opaque
* attribution is nearly impossible

Legal tools built for humans strain badly here.

===== Popper said suppression should be a last resort. =====

But modern systems often force decisions:
* too late (damage already done)
* or too early (overreach, backlash)

This creates a temporal mismatch Popper did not solve:

: 

==== Ironically, Popper’s paradox is now sometimes used intolerantly. ====

Actors invoke it to:
* justify broad censorship
* silence dissent by labeling it “intolerant”
* collapse disagreement into moral threat

This is anti-Popperian.

Popper explicitly warned:
* against suppressing opinions as such
* against abandoning rational engagement prematurely

If everything is labeled intolerant, tolerance dies anyway.

==== A modernized Popper would likely add: ====

===== Tolerance cannot survive in environments engineered to: =====
* reward outrage
* fragment attention
* erase context

Open societies now depend on:
* media architecture
* platform incentives
* friction, not just freedom

===== Popper favored rules of engagement, not truth authorities. =====

Today this points to:
* transparency requirements
* provenance and authentication
* limits on automated amplification
* friction against virality

Not “deciding truth”, but defending the conditions of correction.

===== Tolerance is no longer just: =====
* a cultural virtue

It is:
* a technical achievement
* a systems-engineering problem

This is a major shift from Popper’s time.

==== Popper aged better than most 20th-century political philosophers—but not unchanged. ====
* His diagnosis still holds.
* His optimism about discourse needs updating.
* His ideas are necessary but insufficient for digital societies.

If Popper warned against naive tolerance, the 21st century warns against naive openness.

The challenge now is preserving error-correction under conditions of cognitive overload—a problem Popper glimpsed, but could not yet see in full.

If you want, we can:
* connect Popper to Friston and predictive processing
* contrast him with Isaiah Berlin or Hannah Arendt
* or ask the uncomfortable question of whether liberalism itself is cognitively sustainable in mass societies