I slapped together another demo, this time of a song called Breaking the Frames. It’s a protest song written about and for the Luddites of early nineteenth century Britain. The Luddite “revolt” was the response of apprenticed Nothingham weavers to the practice of factory owners installing weaving machines called frames and hiring unskilled labor at reduced wages to work these contraptions.
However, the story of craftsmen being steamrolled over by technology is far from a historical concern. Today, the outsourcing tread of large businesses to move programming jobs overseas is probably the most familiar example of this phenomenon to readers of use.perl.org. What my song attempts to capture is the brave and utter futility of fighting this kind of “progress”. Life is about adaptation and adaptation is often painful.
This song is part of series of thematically related songs labelled “encode”. You can listen to this series through this playlist.