Science & Tech Quote by Michael Nesmith

Nesmith talks like a musician who’s survived both bad gigs and bad business models: the crash is just smoke, the show goes on. Coming from a pop-culture figure who straddled art and commerce (Monkees fame, then early MTV-era video experimentation), the line lands as a surprisingly fluent bit of market psychology. It’s not cheerleading so much as stagecraft: if you can control the mood in the room, you can keep the band playing until the audience settles.

The intent is plain: reassure. But the subtext is sharper. By framing the dot-com bust as temporary haze, Nesmith implies the panic is more perception than substance. “Once the smoke clears” suggests the real damage is obscured by spectacle - the headlines, the plunge, the collective flinch. He reaches for eBay and Yahoo as proof-of-life because they’re recognizable brands, the kind of household names that make a technological future feel inevitable even when the valuations aren’t.

Context does the heavy lifting. This is the early-2000s hangover, when the Internet had already rewired daily behavior but Wall Street was still deciding whether it was infrastructure or a fad. Nesmith sides with infrastructure. “Pick back up and go” is an almost casual verb choice that treats the web like a utility with momentum, not a fragile startup ecosystem.

There’s also a quiet self-portrait here: a creative industry veteran betting that distribution always wins. The market can get drunk, crash, wake up, and pretend it learned something. The network, he’s saying, just keeps routing around the damage.