This Lifehacker post is from 2018 so perhaps y’all are already aware, but my partner just alerted me to the existence of an app entitled “Sh**t! I Smoke.”

Thought it was especially relevant to share here in the Bay Area given the current climate (literally), and even moreso considering

  1. the number of participants in the Stigma study who framed the harmfulness of cigarette smoking within the context of larger, structural health threats re: environmental pollution (most often in a “so smoking doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things” sort of way, in terms of their own health and in response to concerns/accusations that smoking is a particularly harmful and/or major source of environmental pollution)

  2. compounded concerns about population-level and individual respiratory health amid fires + COVID

  3. will be very interesting to see how the theme mentioned in point 1 shows up in our current study on Tobacco Harm Reduction given point 2!

Everything about this app is rhetorically FASCINATING.

The app icon is the shape of a poop emoji made out of a cigarette.

Cigarette twisted into the shape of a poop emoji

Everyone is a smoker within the language of this app…

Screen capture from app, point location in Oakland, CA, says "OMG! You smoke 9.3 cigarettes daily"Screen capture from app, point location in Oakland, CA, says "Dang! You smoke 64.9 cigarettes weekly"

… and it’s obvious that that is BAD.

Screen capture from app, reads "Loading... Cough... Cough"

But at the same time the positioning of personal responsibility, victimhood, innocence, and contagion are structured totally differently.

Screen capture from app says "The app was inspired by Berkeley Earth's findings about the equivalence between air pollution and cigarette smoking. The rule of thumb is... one cigarette per day is the rough equivalent of a PM2.5 level of 22"

Neat, wow, yikes, enjoy!

(All images via the Sh**t! I Smoke app)

Em Sanders
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