Page - 72 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

72 siting futurity printing time-limited money. He said, we’re printing money that will lose its value very quickly and must be invested. That inspired people to invest very quickly, to expand their posi- tions, their pensions. It worked so well that the government threatened to call in the army, because one can’t let another currency exist in a country.] (“Presseheft” 2015) Before Planet Ottakring, Wörgl’s experiment was only men- tioned in the occasional article in the press, for example on its seventy-fifth (Broer 2007) and eightieth anniversaries (Dunst 2012). It will be interesting to see whether this renewed interest in alternative currencies translates into more knowledge about them and more in actual circulation. In trumpeting alternative currencies and explaining in detail the way they work on the ground, Planet Ottakring takes precise- ly the opposite tack of more mainstream financial films, which tend to focus on extremely complicated, algorithmically driven virtual financial instruments invented for the specific purpose of making self-styled “masters of the universe” very wealthy very quickly. While films such as Inside Job (2010, dir. Charles Fer- guson), Margin Call (2011, dir. J.C. Chandor), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, dir. Martin Scorsese), Master of the Universe (2013, dir. Marc Bauder), The Big Short (2015, dir. Adam McCay), Equi- ty (2016, dir. Meera Menon), and Banking on Bitcoin (2016, dir. Christopher Cannucciari), deal with complex trading practices of dubious legality and tend to garner comments such as “[w] atching the film without any economics or basic banking/trad- ing knowledge could be hard at times” (helloamazon), Riebl’s film provides precisely such basic knowledge. It makes clear that just as water is necessary for a human body’s circulation, the circulation of currency is equally important to the healthy func- tioning of local shops and services.12 When this circulation is disrupted by processes of accumulation, local economies, which provide for the livelihood of local citizens, suffer. It is not bor- 12 My thanks to Carrie Smith-Prei for helping me to nuance this analogy so that its economic import was clearer.