Thanks to kind reader Manuel W., I’ve learned some reality TV producer and part-time “undercover rap phenomenon” (i.e., a white dude in Brooklyn) has named his production company “Miscellaneous Media.”

Do not confuse that outfit with this, your one and only genuine original MISCmedia, providing the finest in verbal contemplations and brusque putdowns since that other dude was still rhyming milk-milk-lemonade.

(Warning: This installment is going to ramble even further afield than usual.)

A few days ago, I wrote something critical of Jaron Lanier’s rant against digital culture, You Are Not a Gadget.

In one part of his book, Lanier blamed the economic crash of ’08 on the computer technology that had made the housing bubble’s suspect “investment products” possible.

I wrote that blame for the bubble shouldn’t be laid on Net tech, but that it might instead be laid on Net business culture, on the “Get Big Fast” mentality of unalloyed hustle seen in the first dot-com mania.

What really went on on Wall Street and the other global finance capitals is a little more complicated than that. But not much.

Several commentators have noted links between the speculators and the philosophies of Ayn Rand. “The great recession is all her fault,” alleged Andrew Corsello in a GQ essay last fall. Slate’s Johann Hari, reviewing two recent Rand biographies, blames “this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls” for the speculators’ sociopathic levels of selfishness, and even for the Bush-Cheney Republicans’ highly organized cruelty (“…by drilling into the basest human instincts”).

Some French radicals, meanwhile, have created a movement they call “Post-Autistic Economics.” Their premise, as best I can figure it out (I’ve always been lousy at understanding Euro-intellectual theorizing) is that geeky math-heavy economic and political planning is the enemy of any attempt to build a more humane society.

Some critics of the P.A.E. gang have apparently alleged that to call the global elite’s machinations “autistic” is an insult to real autistics. I’d agree.

It’s also an insult to those who love math and abstractions and game theory and techy or trivia-y stuff, a.k.a. nerds. This is a group in which I consider myself a member (despite my lack of prowess at software coding and my indifference toward Dungeons & Dragons).

As Benjamin Nugent expresses in his new book American Nerd: The Story of My People (a great and funny tribute to braniacs from assorted times and places), a guy’s inability at the unwritten rules of social engagement does NOT mean he’s insensitive or that he doesn’t care about people. It just means he’s lousy at communicating his care.

And care, ultimately, is what will get us out of this mess. It’s the only thing that can.

Which brings us to yet another book.

Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis attempts nothing less than the re-direction of how the whole planet thinks and relates.

Rifkin (himself an experienced economics and history nerd) sees social networking and Web 2.0 sites as helping to bring people together—a togetherness he thinks we’ll desperately need if we’re going to save the planet, reduce poverty and disease, etc.

In geekess supreme Arianna Huffington’s interpretation, Rifkin’s book…

…challenges the conventional view of human nature embedded in our educational systems, business practices, and political culture—a view that sees human nature as detached, rational, and objective, and sees individuals as autonomous agents in pursuit primarily of material self-interest. And it seeks to replace that view with a counter-narrative that allows humanity to see itself as an extended family living in a shared and interconnected world.

The Chinese backed out of a takeover deal, so GM plans to shut down Hummer. The NYT says the brand sold only 265 vehicles in January.

Without the vehicle that most blatantly iconified Bush-era macho posturing and material waste, what will the Pike/Pine hipsters use as an all-purpose symbol to ridicule the hated evil mainstream America?

Oh yeah, there’s still Wal-Mart. For now.

That hoped-for big south-O-the-border business boost from the Vancouver Olympics? Not gonna happen, probably.

At The Atlantic, Don Peck ponders what could happen if high unemployment for the non-rich sticks around for years to come .

I’m old enough to have seen that very thing, during the Boeing slump of the early ’70s.

What happened was a lot of emotional depression, a lot of moving away (Seattle proper lost about 10 percent of its population), a lot of depressed home values, and, eventually, a lot of entrepreneurism, as desperate folks got up and tried to rebuild their lives with or without a paternalistic big employer.

From a 1933 issue of Fortune magazine, here’s an in-depth analysis (with full color illos) of the industry that was newspaper comic strips. Competitive big-city newspapers were at or just past their peak, and collectively supported over 230 daily strips.

No matter what you may think of Microsoft and its products, it remains one of the Seattle area’s still-thriving corporate giants. But for how long? Former MS VP Dick Brass (no puns about the name, please) believes it might not be for long, due to fatal bureaucratic stagnation:

Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

Corporate consultant Paula Krapf thinks the recent dustup over Macmillan Publishing demanding higher Kindle ebook profits represents a battle of “Amazon Vs. the World (the New York Publishing World)“.

The last time New York business titans took on a Seattle company, we ended up with a butchered and eviscerated WaMu.

Seattle’s own branding and logo-design hotshot Tim Girvin offers his own historical thoughts about Apple, Steve Jobs, and the road to the iPad.

My own thoughts:

• I don’t yet know enough about it to know if it really is the gadget that will save the news media, let alone the book or TV industries. For instance, I don’t know if it will support full professional typography in publications distributed as iPad apps (it doesn’t support it in Apple’s own iBooks app). I strongly believe real fonts, chosen and tweaked and kerned by real designers (and not just the seven or eight “web-safe fonts,” either) are the key to making online-distributed reading matter seem professional enough to command a price.
• The hardware’s limitations don’t bother me. It doesn’t have a cell phone in it, but third party software will certainly being Internet-based phone calling to it. It doesn’t have a standard USB plug, but it will have an optional adapter for one (which means you can attach external storage devices, webcams, etc.).
• The software’s limitations concern me a bit more. A device meant to be, among other things, a full service Internet browser needs to be able to run Adobe Flash. A device meant to be an on-the-go field computer needs multitasking (more than one application running at one time), or at least a universal clipboard. With luck, these discrepancies should be fixed before long.
• What are the fine-print terms of the AT&T 3G data subscription, available as an option with the higher-end versions of the iPad? Could I use it with WiFi to run a Net connection into my regular computer?
• As UK comedy legend Stephen Fry notes, Jobs gives a helluva presentation. As others noted, Jobs and Obama, those two master sales-orators of our time, spoke on the same day. Obama’s speech was telecast and streamed live to millions. Jobs’s speech wasn’t, except for a few brief excerpts on CNBC. Most people who wanted to learn every detail as the announcement was happening had to settle for “liveblogging” text commentaries at various techie Web sites—which can actually be a more intimate, more involving medium than just watching somebody talk.
• I don’t care about the name, either way. And the jokes about it are already old; which is probably just how Apple predicted they’d be when the name was picked.
• Yes. I want one.

Onetime Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, who was more recently one of Air America Radio’s revolving bosses, says the liberal talk radio distributor could have had a chance, had its organizers been willing to lose money and plea for donations.

At Paste magazine, Rachel Maddux asks the musical question, “Is Indie Dead?” Her answer: Yes. Deal with it and move on already:

Indie is, at once, a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing. It stands among the most important, potentially sustainable and meaningful movements in American popular culture—not just music, but for the whole cultural landscape. But because it was originally sculpted more in terms of what it opposed than what it stood for, the only universally held truth about “indie” is that nobody agrees on what it means.

Been wondering when Seattle would get a permanent, tangible Kurt Cobain memorial other than that bench in Viretta Park? Wonder no longer. Here’s the “giant Cobain-inspired guitar” neon sign for the new Hard Rock Cafe on Pike Street. You know, the bar/restaurant/club/merch shop that was supposed to have opened last summer.

Robin Williams was on the next-to-last Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. Williams had also been on the next-to-last Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. It’s a tribute to O’Brien’s and Williams’s media-historicism that neither felt the need to announce this symmetry.

Then next on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, we learned how to get kids into more book-reading, thanks to the cast of the stage musical Fela.

My take on the whole two-week minicrisis that was the Late Night Wars? Leno should never have been offered five hours a week of network prime time. That immediately lowered NBC to the status of a secondary network along the lines of The CW, and made Leno’s own schtick seem as tired and overworked as, well, it is.

No, the Leno prim etime show should have been a weekly or twice-weekly franchise. Like Dateline or Deal Or No Deal, it could have become a programming backstop the network could plug into any troublesome timeslot. Now we’ll never know how that strategy could have worked. And we’re not likely to get comedy-variety back in prime time for some time.

Air America Radio, the high-profile attempt to build a national network devoted exclusively to left-O-center talk, suddenly shut down all its live programming on Thursday. Affiliate stations will be supplied with rerun shows through Monday evening, while the company plans an orderly shutdown.

This is NOT the end of liberal talk radio.

The local stations (such as the CBS-owned KPTK in Seattle) that had carried AAR’s shows have also carried liberal shows from other distributors. These shows, such as those of Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller, will continue. Several former AAR hosts are also now with other distributors (including Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, and Mike Malloy).

The remaining AAR personalities are now free to sign with these other distributors. They include the Seattle-based Ron Reagan, the last AAR host still carried on KPTK’s pre-midnight weekday schedule.

So what did AAR in? Why did it flail about in fiscal instability for six years?

From the start, its reach was bigger than its grasp.

It wanted to start up from scratch as an all-day, coast-to-coast, unified force in broadcasting. That’s not how antenna-based broadcasting works. You’ve gotta start one station at a time, and build each show in each region. That’s what the conservative talkers did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s what the syndicators of Schultz, Miller, et al. do.

Robert McChesney was one of the founders of The Rocket, Seattle’s erstwhile rock n’ roll tabloid bible.

Then he went off to Wisconsin to be a radical scholar and professor of media studies, writing several books about the evils of corporate-controlled news and broadcasting.

Now, he and John Nichols have cowritten a manifesto book suggesting federal government subsidies for news organizations, presumably including the Seattle Times—which co-presented the authors’ Town Hall appearance Tuesday night.

How would an already fiscally flailing government find the funds for this? Not specified.