Creativity Quote by Michael Nesmith

Nesmith is smuggling a systems critique into a shrug. “Linear thinking” isn’t just a bland insult; it’s his shorthand for an industry that has confused efficiency with inevitability. The telling move is how he describes it as something that “gets…patterns built into it somehow,” as if the machine is self-assembling habits the humans inside it no longer consciously choose. That feigned uncertainty (“I’m not sure how that happens”) reads less like ignorance than a musician’s deadpan: everyone knows how it happens - incentives calcify, gatekeepers copy yesterday’s winners, and complexity gets flattened into a pipeline.

Then he drops the punchline: “certainly you take a look at dinosaurs.” It’s funny because it’s disproportionate; we’ve gone from business process to mass extinction in one hop. But the exaggeration is the argument. Dinosaurs become the cautionary mascot for dominance without adaptability, an apex system so specialized it can’t pivot when the climate changes. In music, that climate is taste, technology, distribution, and the weird emotional economy of fandom. Nesmith lived through multiple upheavals: manufactured pop stardom with the Monkees, the long hangover of that branding, and later the video-era reinvention where MTV rewired how songs were sold and seen. He’s not romanticizing chaos; he’s warning that a mature industry’s greatest talent is making its assumptions feel natural - until, abruptly, they don’t.