Meatbags and Machines

If you’ve just landed on viewyonder.com via Google, you might be disappointed.

If your spaceship that landed here came from the tech industry, then the headline says Meatbags and Machines should make sense.

Who does whimsy in business? Me. 30 years of tech biz doesn’t calcify, it erodes…

..to where we (you and me, Dear Reader) are today.

The AI discourse|hypebag|snotbubble has been running on imaginary money, caffeine and existential dread for four years straight, and it shows in Youtube thumbnails, every dumb access media takes, and the conspicuous silence of the skeptical majority.

But like all good jokes, “Meatbags and Machines” has a several, relatable truths inside it.

Much like Fools and Horses. “Money doesn’t make you happy, but it sure takes the sting out of being poor.”

Where “meatbag” comes from

I’m a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, especially his dystopian short essay Harrison Bergeron. I also dig Orwell’s digs at you-know-who. Though recent Hollywood seem to have got it wrong with their anti-capitalist 2026 Animal Farm. The berks.

They never say “Meatbag” but you know they’re talking about you. Like the old days with radio when you tuned into nothing at all and listened to the hiss: you can hear Meatbag.

The tech-bro shorthand for the slow, fleshy, useless, not-San Francisco, error-prone humans gumming up the path to whatever the singularity is supposed to be this week. The vibe is roughly: humans don’t produce anything, machines will produce everything, here’s your universal basic income, now please be quiet.

THEY WILL TAKE UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME AND BE HAPPY.

Like there’s not studies that prove people on benefits, especially men, are suicidal.

But hey, let’s step back from the void (but not petend it’s not there).

I’m drafting two books in a row, using AI for research but not writing. One is “I, Meatbag”, the other is “Meatbag Farm”. They will shock you and delight you. Make you feel a bit sick.

But enough of that. Why the H1 “Meatbags and Machines”?

What the headline is actually carrying

Unlike buses, these points came in threes:

One: AND, not OR.

Most AI marketing — almost all of it — implies replacement.

Replace your support team. Replace your designers. Replace your developers.

Viewyonder doesn’t.

The conjunction in the headline is the whole point.

It is humans and machines, working together, or it isn’t worth doing. If the only way your business case closes is by removing the humans, you’re not pioneering anything — you’re just cost-cutting in a fancy hat.

You’re not an inventor. You are not a creator of value. You are a cost-cutting, value-destroying mofo. << yes I meant that >>

But you might not know (or care) of what you do — you don’t need a licence to be dumb and/or dangerous — so let’s go darker on the sinister shenanigans behind some AI protagonists:

Two: reclaiming the meatbag slur.

If the loudest voices in the valley genuinely believe humans are surplus to requirements, fine. We’ll wear the label they gave us, ironically, and out-build them with it. Meatbags built every interesting thing on this planet, including the machines. We’re not done yet.

And then there are the “AI First” brigade. Writing memos, with AI, to tell humans to use AI first — first for what? For machines to extract the goodness first, deposit their waste into a bucket so the meatbags can just suck greedily at an empty tube?

Three: order matters.

Meatbags comes first in the headline. That’s a time directive — humans set the intent, then machines execute against it. And it’s a hierarchy — machines serve people, not the other way round. Reverse the order and you reverse the values. We don’t.

What this means for the rest of the site

The headline is the thesis. Everything else here — the Quickstarts, Injectionator, Coherence, the articles, the build log — is the evidence. Tools that make individual humans more capable. Engagements that put a working thing in your hands by Friday. Writing that takes the idea of pioneering people with AI at work seriously.

Meatbags and machines. In that order.

NB.1: we need a banner, maybe a scarf. NB.2: you vegans are meatbags too!