Science & Tech Quote by Michael Nesmith

Nesmith isn’t marveling at the Internet as a shiny tool; he’s treating it like a power grid. Access is the promise, but maintenance is the real politics. By framing the Internet as “provides the access to resources,” he quietly demotes the romance of digital freedom and puts a spotlight on whoever owns the pipes, platforms, and catalogs. The loaded phrase “incumbent upon” is doing a lot of work: it shifts responsibility away from users and toward gatekeepers, suggesting that tech’s vaunted decentralization still ends in custodianship, decision-making, and, inevitably, leverage.

The subtext is a musician’s hard-earned skepticism about “free.” Nesmith came from an era when creative labor was mediated by labels, broadcasters, and distributors; the Internet promised to flatten that hierarchy, then rebuilt it with different landlords. His concern for keeping the “economic engine” intact reads like a warning against two extremes that defined digital culture: utopian piracy-as-liberation on one side, and monopoly platform capitalism on the other. He’s arguing for a middle path where access doesn’t become an excuse to starve the people making the work.

Context matters: as one of the first artists to grapple with music video, media rights, and the business mechanics behind pop culture, Nesmith is speaking less as a nostalgic rocker and more like a systems thinker. The Internet, in his view, doesn’t abolish economics; it makes the stewardship of it unavoidable.