01669nas a2200121   4500008004100000245011000041210006900151260001200220520119600232100002501428700002501453856006901478       2014                        eng d00aAttitudes towards technology: dominant technological optimism and challenges for the degrowth alternative0 aAttitudes towards technology dominant technological optimism and  aLeipzig3 aThe way our society sees and relates itself to technology is crucial for the debate on economic degrowth. Latouche and others have recognized this and propose, a highly critical if not pessimist attitude. A position which goes back to Georgescu-Roegen but more importantly to Ivan Illich and those authors which describe technological systems as autonomous social systems; most prominently Jaques Ellul. This is a radical and indeed welcome deviation from the dominant paradigm of unquestioned technological optimism, which has traditionally been propagated by the economics discipline from early classical writers until today’s neoclassical orthodoxy. The radical call for a selective moratoria on new technologies at the 2010 Barcelona degrowth conference, illustrates well this deviation in the general degrowth community. However, in this paper we argue that in the absence of critical self-reflection, the community may easily find itself having replaced the dominant “techno-optimist” – dogma, with a “techno-pessimist dogma”. To paraphrase Latouche, what is needed, for a sustainable future without economic growth, is a decolonization of our imaginaries about technology.1 aKerschner, Christian1 aEhlers, Melf-Hinrich  uhttps://degrowth.community/conference2014/scientific-papers/3528