Page - 184 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

184 siting futurity Most of the empty apartments in the forests of towers around Hallstatt See and beyond were purchased with what, in the spirit of Planet Ottakring, we might call “Kommunisten,” in that they have worked the same way they do in the film to build up the economy, but on a much more massive scale.17 What this study also helps us see is the profoundly hybrid state of what is generally held to be, and interacted with as, re- ality. As each of the book’s case studies makes clear in its own way, it is not only the new copy-towns in China that should be understood as simulacrascapes. Our engagement with all places is overlain on at least three levels: by the images and forms of cultural production that exist of them, by the histories of past events that have taken place in them, and by the unconscious fears and desires we project onto them. The problem, as Adrian Ivakhiv so cogently explains in Shadowing the Anthropocene, is that we have been trained to see only the physical world and not its shadows: Commodity capitalism has been profoundly successful at encouraging us to think that objects are real, and at project- ing value into those objects so that they serve the needs of individuals, even if they never manage to do that (which is, of course, the point). The effects of our actions, on the other hand, are systemic and relational, and we won’t understand them unless we come to a better appreciation of how systems and relational ecologies work and of how we are thoroughly enmeshed within them. (Ivakhiv 2018, 23) enon, but this type of debt is part of a new regime of power that is capable of binding and expelling in ways that are novel. Those students will have that debt until they die, but the debt will not die, even when they die. It passes on to whoever is pertinent. And in the meantime, finance can make it work for its purposes — it is not just sitting there. Via algorithmic mass you can transform it into a working element.” Frankenstein, indeed. 17 One can thus better appreciate the implications of the announcement across the news services on January 18, 2019, that Beijing was finally going to open its banking, insurance, and securities markets, something it had promised repeatedly to do since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.