At this stage in my life, I have lived through what probably will be the most comfortable decade in the last 50 years, for Europeans at least. It has been a period of extreme stability within the EU, as it has increasingly been able to profit from the suffering around it. In this period, corporations have enjoyed a public that has become increasingly uncritical and willing to forego basic human rights like its privacy, to sell its existence to companies that want to exploit it to extract every penny from every living thing that could conceivably carry a penny.
As corporations turn to exploitation of the vast amount of data tracks that we leave all over the internet, they resort not only to sophisticated methods of correlating and collating data in order to identify us and determine our behaviours and preferences, but also more aggressively push old and crude methods like advertising. Advertising takes more time1 than ever2 and email spam has won, in spite of the millions of web pages dedicated to teaching you how to block it.
One particularly malicious method that a software developer will eagerly exploit with no second thought to ethics or rights are push notifications. Most people are extremely eager to take concepts from software engineering - in this case push-pull architectures - and apply it to other things. In the most benign of situations, this would be a computer scientist thinking the polynomial hierarchy means something about the universe, and posting their crackpot theories on /r/physics, and promptly getting their post removed and ridiculed, as they should. In the most damaging and lingering cases, however, they turn a minor concept into mass harassment and disruption 3.
However, the lack of meaningful self-reflection, on a personal and collective level, means that the techies cannot stop there. They can do worse, by taking a psychological trick and applying intent to it. In this case, antisemitic intent. On November 9 2022, customers of KFC in Germany saw a message4 that said: “It’s memorial day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!”
‘Kristallnacht’ was a pogrom against Jewish people carried out by the Nazi party’s Sturmabteilung paramilitary and Schutzstaffel paramilitary forces and the Hitler Youth. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude5 to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. It is not an occasion celebrated in Germany, by any German state. I believe it goes without saying that it’s not a celebration to Jewish people either, no matter their location.
None of that stopped KFC. It has not stopped them from issuing the weakest of weak-ass apologies along with the following infuriating statement:
The fast food chain said the “automated push notification” was “linked to calendars that include national observances”.
Assuming this statement was done in good will, an assumption which is not reasonable in my book, this excuses no wrongdoing or oversight. That is because, even if it is true, it means it is based on a calendar that has no fundamental relationship to official state calendars: Kristallnacht is not a national observance in Germany: it is neither a holiday, nor a celebration.
This is such an egregious lack of care that is positively racist and antisemitic in particular, regardless of whether it is illegal or not, which frankly I hope it is. It is equally unquestionable that this was an entirely preventable occurrence: it is a trivial thing to vet and/or test, it is obviously racist, and entirely disgusting to suggest the murders of hundreds of people should be commemorated by the purchase of what is, if we all care to admit it, an equally abhorrent product that does not and never has resembled chicken.
Unfortunately, the company does not seem to be facing anything but public outcry which is quickly forgotten. This means the developers behind this will face no consequences, and thus continue their damaging practice unabated. On and on, we move on to make everything worse.
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“Kristallnacht”. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia. Hutchinson Encyclopedias (18th ed.). London: Helicon. p. 1,199 ↩