Conference presentation: Technological optimism as a cultural-existential challenge – Where does it spring from and can it be falsified?

Technological optimism in sustainability discourse does not seem to falter either by the recent
results in economics and material sciences refuting decoupling scenarios, nor by results in natural
sciences that illustrate how the expansive technosphere replaces living nature. But is there anything
new here? Looking fifty years back, the Limits to growth report – summarizing the calculations of
the world’s first supercomputer – warned against technological optimism. But in vain, as the report’s
alarming message was papered over by even fiercer technological optimism. So it seems that critical
views on technology fall on deaf ears not only when they are articulated by humanist intellectuals,
but also when these warnings come from the pinnacle of empirical and predictive sciences of each
era. Thus it needs to be asked if technological optimism is at all falsifiable, and what would such
falsification require?
I suggest three possible loci (and according fields) where this seeming non-falsifiability might lurk:
First, in personal worldviews (education), second, in the cultures of science and expertise (sociology
of science) and third, in the fossil-fuelled modern self-understanding of rational human autonomy
(energy humanities). In these framings technological optimism acts as experientially and existentially
constitutive element: it is the ‘ground’ that is difficult to expose under critical evaluation. Thus giving
up technological optimism hardly happens in argumentative and epistemic registers. It would rather
mean ontological and existential transformation in worldviews, expert cultures and society at large.