Abstract
This article uses the dashboard camera (commonly, dashcam) to consider platformed logics of injury. Installed in cars, dashcams are often purposed to arbitrate accidents. In Singapore, however, dashcams have fostered huge communities on social media, who regularly post and comment on dashcam footage. Furthermore, due to the nature of their work, food delivery riders also constitute common subjects of these footages. The article explores these relationships by revealing, first, how dashcams have historically coupled exploitation and justice. It has relied on the broken bodies of platform workers for consumer interest, but attached with the promise that the technology can also address the structural injustice of platformed work. This capitalization of injury continues into the present, with dashcams also serving as the key site for the visibility of structural injury among food delivery riders.
Torn food delivery bags, bloodied face masks, mangled electric-powered bicycles, and motorbikes strewn on the road tarmac—these objects, commonly found in images of accidents of food delivery platform workers, became common to Singapore media after platform delivery services became popular in 2019. One such image was circulated in March 2021 when food delivery rider Simon Teo was struck by a drunk driver while fulfilling an order at night. Seeking justice for the accident, social groups took to posting pictures of Teo and his daughter while imploring for a “video witness” to the accident (Lay, 2021a). The “video witness” here refers to the dashboard camera (commonly, “dashcam”), a medium that is often used to determine fault in an automobile accident. This purpose of the dashcam has also led to the production of the largest audiovisual archive of injury within platform work in Singapore. Social media channels like SG Road Vigilante, Singapore Reckless Drivers Community, and Roads.sg jointly hold hundreds of dashcam footages of platform work accidents on YouTube testifying to the dangers of the trade and road.
In this article, we analyze dashcam technology to consider the ways that platforms extract economic value and alter the articulations of injury in Singapore. In the first instance, dashcams can be understood as a direct address of injury. As Tarleton Gillespie (2018, p. 66) points out, behind “every traffic light is a tombstone”—lurking behind every sociotechnical assembly purposed for safety is the shadow of a life-threatening accident. Designed for the arbitration of accidents, dashcams point to the violence of vehicles and roads, and the videos of workers bloodied, maimed, crushed constitute the visceral evidence of those most impacted: platform workers who spend an inordinate amount of time on them (Orr et al., 2023). When circulated, these footages provoke public concern, putting pressure on platforms to respond. For example, viral footage of food delivery accidents has led people to write to newspapers in Singapore, demanding that governments and platforms address the road accidents of platform work (A. Ang, 2022).
At the same time, dashcams reinforce structural injury by framing these incidents as “accidents”—exceptional events distinct from the broader conditions of platform work (Singer, 2024). Writing on “forensic media,” Greg Siegel (2014) notes that technologies like dashcams are primarily used to control and even permit accidents. Dashcams allow accidents to be reframed as “teachable moments,” incidents from which knowledge can be excavated from, entwined with the promise that the knowledge of accidents would afford control over its contingency (Siegel, 2014, p. 29). This desire for control over accidents explains how dashcams support optimism in an injurious form of technological progress. They suppress the violence of technological failure by stressing the cumulative knowledge of safety, producible through accidents, which promise better technologies. But in offering this promise, forensic media also encourage the collective complicity of the injury experienced by platform workers.
Dashcams and the platform
These dynamics render the dashcam useful for understanding how injury is constructed for the platform economy. In recent years, scholars have turned to technologies that predate modern platforms to critically examine the logics and operations of contemporary platform economies. Platform shoes (Singh & Banet-Weiser, 2022), Toyota’s kanban system (Steinberg, 2021), and barrier-free infrastructure (Hong, 2024) have been deployed to investigate the politics of feminized visibility, data management, and inclusivity in present-day digitized platforms. In similar ways, dashcams share important points of affinity with platforms. As a class of technology, the dashcam is designed for platforming: it is an ambient data-collecting device stacked on top of the vehicle dashboard, made to automatically assemble telematic metrics along with audiovisual data to present an account of occurrences on the road.
These affordances have fuelled platform imaginaries. In 2014, law enforcement authorities in Singapore initiated the “Vehicles-on-Watch” program, a program that platformed consumer dashcams as part of the state’s surveillance infrastructure, allowing law enforcement access to consumer dashcams for the 24-hour surveillance of roads and property (Aw, 2014). The slogan for this program—“Your Camera, Our Security”—anticipates the intensification in the platformization of dashcams (Aw, 2014). Today, consumer dashcams are also integrated into “fleet management systems,” surveillance systems that integrate audiovisual data from inward and outward dashcams with geolocation, vehicle information, and the driver’s biometrics to allow taxi and trucking firms to monitor workers at a distance (Levy, 2022). These systems typically present dashcam information on platforms. For example, the promotional material of Samsara (2024) shows information from dashcams presented on an enterprise platform, offering analytics that allow managers to evaluate workers at scale.
These examples illustrate the dashcam’s entanglement with a platform imaginary. “Platforms,” Marc Steinberg (2019) write, “designate not just particular technological entities but managerial constructs that shape us and the relations we enter into with other people, companies, and objects” (p. 3). Certainly, dashcams are not platforms in the ways that Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber are. Nonetheless, they are consistently enacted and imagined as data intermediaries, transforming relations around accidents and injury. Such a quality existed from the very beginning with the dashcam community in Singapore. Founders of the Roads.sg community explained that they had envisioned the uploaded dashcam footage to serve as a searchable “library” of license plate numbers which can be used for a variety purposes, such as enabling insurers to increase the premiums of reckless motorists who might otherwise get away scot-free (A. Lim, 2016).
This statement shows how consumer dashcams are not simply used for their stated purpose: providing private evidence of liability. The founders of Road.sg imagined dashcams as social technologies of justice. The data collected and publicly shared are meant to transform the discourse of accidents: to change how injury is recognized, and who and what is penalized. These imaginaries are then normalized in the dashcam’s use. As example, the naming and posting conventions of social media dashcam clips in Singapore where the license plate numbers are placed in titles by uploaders continue with the wish to use dashcams to mediate accidents.
These entangled relations between dashcams and platforms afford a vantage into the ways that injury is represented and capitalized on. Modern economies of injury, Jasbir Puar (2017) offers, can be channeled through unlife—a “will not let die”—that involves damaging bodies for propensities of profit and control (p. 147). This schema rationalizes the injurious kinds of profit associated with attrition (Vora, 2015), while legally disassociating from the intent of slaughter (Puar, 2017). The extensive literature around platform work has made clear the connections between labor and injury (see as examples, Orr et al., 2023; Wood et al., 2019), but such injury is often positioned as a bug or side-effect of the platform gig economy. It remains hard to see how injury may in fact be a driver of the platform economy. Dashcams offer this vantage by allowing scrutiny into how economic value may be extracted from accidents and injury itself.
We locate this argument within a region-specific approach to the study of platforms (Athique, 2020; Chen & Soriano, 2022; Zhang & Chen, 2022). Platform scholars have showed that platforms are determined by regulatory and market conditions that are “geographically sticky” (Graham & Ferrari, 2022, p. 15) and trans-regional (Zhang & Chen, 2022). Localities matter even when platform work and services are disembedded from the spaces where they originate. And regardless of the geographic span of the platform and its consumer and supply chain, the region-specific qualities of platforms have important impacts on the imagined cohesiveness of the region, allowing regional communities to grasp “a feeling of something coming into common” (Steinberg & Li, 2017, p. 179).
This article brings these two points together in this paper, illustrating how thinking of dashcams as platforms allows us to grasp the economies of injury specific to platform capitalism in Singapore (Athique, 2020). Our argument proceeds in two parts. After providing context on platforms, accidents, and the politics of injury in Asia, we de-Westernize the history of dashcam adoption by referencing a viral dashcam footage in May 2012 that featured the accident of a Singaporean taxi-driver. The link between platforms and injury starts here: the commercialization of dashcams depended on the YouTube virality of injury (Cheong & Chen, 2015) which in turn relied upon the bodies of taxi-drivers, the dominant form of gig work that preceded platform workers in Singapore (Hong & Chan, 2023). This history, so dense with many region-specific aspects of the platform, reflects the unique conditions of platformed injury in the country. We continue by bringing this analysis to the present, reading and viewing dashcam footages involving food delivery workers on the YouTube channel, SG Road Vigilante. Reviewing interactions around 160 Singapore dashcam footages, we offer how dashcams both capitalize on and resist the conditions of injury in platformed work.
Accidents and platform work
Traffic accidents have been a subject of study since Uber began as a ride-hailing service in North America. But research interest in this subject was limited, given that early findings in America and Europe had generally found only weak associations between ride-hailing and traffic accidents (see Morrison et al., 2022). However, the normalization of on-demand courier services around the world has dramatically increased concerns about accidents. Studies in China, India, South Korea, Singapore, Turkey, United States, United Kingdom, and Vietnam have all found a strong relationship between food delivery work and accidents. As example, a daily average of 18 traffic accidents involving delivery staff is recorded in Nanjing, China (Sun, 2019), and more than three quarters of the 480 interviewed in Tianjin expressed involvement in accidents (Wang et al., 2021). Outside China, public health data in South Korea and Turkey show an increase in occupational accidents as courier work became normalized (Demir et al., 2023; Moon et al., 2023) and a poll of over a thousand Singaporean workers noted that 38.3% of full-timers were involved in accidents (Mathews et al., 2022).
But even as it remains right to be alarmed about the general state of platform courier work, these accidents remain structured around an uneven global relation of power. Although reliable statistics are not easily available, reports of accidents suggest that this issue is more serious in the Asia. A global report on road safety by the World Health Organization (2024) lists Southeast Asia as holding the highest number of traffic fatalities. This applies to platform work in most of Asia too. Speaking of delivery accidents in India, for instance, Shubham Agarwal (2022) suggests that “the road to instant groceries is paved with broken bones.” Conditions of delivery in the urban cities of Asia cannot be superficially compared to cities in the developed West. Besides having some of the most traffic-choked cities in the world, many Asian countries lack Western standards of protection. Hence, while unions in Australia have successfully claimed legal compensation for the accidental death of a food delivery motorist in Sydney, and campaigned to have each death named and highlighted in the media (Taylor, 2022), couriers in India and China are routinely overloaded with cargo, forced to speed and take shortcuts to meet short delivery timelines, and often left with no compensation when faced with accidents (Agarwal, 2022; Sun, 2019). In their report on gig workers in Singapore, for instance, Mathews et al. (2022) also found that close to one in five workers ride faster than legally allowed to achieve delivery targets and maximize their incentives. Conditions of injury remain uneven even as platform work generally spur considerations of harm (Hua & Ray, 2018).
In this sense, accidents provide a useful vantage to reveal how such work remains structured around coloniality. As many commentators have pointed out, our digital technologies and infrastructures are manufactured, used, exploited, and maintained around colonial relations of power. The minerals for making devices, assembly of parts, moderation of social content, and sorting of e-waste are largely handled by workers in the Global South, predominantly found in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Qiu, 2017); the imagination of data as exploitable by companies also follows a colonial impulse to expropriate the commons as resources (Couldry & Mejias, 2019); meanwhile, users of social media in the non-West are simultaneously and contradictorily positioned as untapped markets and low in priority in protection, exacerbating problems of platform misinformation and crime especially in non-English speaking parts of the Global South (Udupa & Dattatreyan, 2023). The prevalence of accidents among platform workers in Asia thus reveal how colonial relations of extraction remain mapped onto geographies and populations. Studies, for instance, have found that poor, vulnerable, and marginalized groups are inordinately likely to commit to geo-tethered platform work full-time despite its precariousness because they are unable to find better terms of employment (Hua & Ray, 2018; Orr et al., 2023). Such precariousness, when mapped onto the colonial legacies geographically, intensifies these conditions of injury, resulting in more damaging consequences on workers (Puar, 2017; Udupa & Dattatreyan, 2023; Vora, 2015).
We can read the epidemic of injury in platform courier work in Asia through this same trajectory. Although Uber, ur-platform of geo-tethered labor, was opposed and critiqued when it emerged in the West, the criticisms were largely centered around the algorithmic control and employment status of gig workers (Dubal, 2017; Rosenblat, 2018). This critique, however, fundamentally leaves the Eurocentric and liberal framework of gig work platforms unquestioned (Udupa & Dattatreyan, 2023). And so, like a raised layer suggested of the term “platform”—“a flat two-dimensional stage on which resources are laid out for users to do stuff with”—Uber-type platforms are thought to be applicable everywhere, serving the universal potential of technological (and individual) empowerment (Mattern, 2021, pp. 76–77). Little heed is paid to the unique colonial legacies embedded in each country. How would “platform work” show up, for instance, where the standard employment contract is the exception, where labor protections are negligible, and roads are dangerously choked? This question is especially important in the Global South where injury is oftentimes normalized as a requirement of progress, development, or even survival (Chen & Soriano, 2022; Lamont, 2012; Puar, 2017).
Such region-specific inquiry bears consequence for the 16,000 food delivery workers registered in Singapore under the major food delivery platforms like Grab, Foodpanda, and Deliveroo (Yip & Grosse, 2023). Unlike many other countries that rely on migrant labor (Dubal, 2017; Hua & Rey, 2018; Orr et al., 2023; Sun, 2019), food delivery work is made only available to Singapore citizens and permanent residents. Perhaps due to this, the public concern about food delivery accidents has been significant. Feature-length media reports on food delivery accidents appeared in 2022 (Kok, 2022), after Parliamentary discussion and national surveys revealed high levels of injury among food delivery workers (K. Lim & Ong, 2022). This led to the Platform Workers Bill in 2024, which brought platform workers under the state’s workers compensation insurance (Kok, 2024). Dashcams play a major role in this outcome by contributing to visual evidence of accidents. But in contributing such evidence, it also changes the ways that injury is articulated. Our analysis, as such, directs sensitivity to the cultural formation of injury. How are the narratives of injury produced and (re)circulated? What is recognized as injury, and under what circumstances might they be raised? This refuses an imperial notion of injury and address, seeking to answer instead who dominant accounts of injury profit (Puar, 2017; Vora, 2015) and the culturally specific ways they are articulated (Lamont, 2012).
Dashcams as public platforms of justice
Dominant accounts of dashcam history trace the emergence of dashcams to police vehicles in Texas in the 1980s and stated that it gained popularity as a mass consumer product in the late 2000s when dashcams were reduced in size and cost (Štitilis & Laurinaitis, 2016). This Western, technology-determinist narrative of consumer adoption, however, is incomplete. For one, the adoption of dashcams remains uneven globally even though consumer dashcams can now be bought relatively cheaply. This can partly be attributed to differences in dashcam policies. Privacy policies, for instance, render dashcams illegal in Austria and Portugal (Fox, 2020). But while policies would affect adoption, countries with similar policies also have stark differences in dashcam adoption. Therefore, to understand the prevalence of dashcams, it is first necessary to understand the cultural backdrop that spurred the initial adoption of this technology.
Dashcams entered the Singapore market in the 2010s when roads were dramatically becoming more crowded (Siddik, 2011). In the decade from 2000 to 2010, the number of registered vehicles increased by 36%, from 692,807 to 945,829, which led to a rise in traffic congestion and road accidents (SingStat, 2024). Writing in 2008, newspapers noted that “Singapore has one of the worst road-fatality records among developed countries” and that the number of Singaporeans killed and injured on roads is “rising” steadily (Fernandez, 2008). Notably, despite this, the adoption of dashcams remained slow, suggesting that the assumed selling point of dashcams—that it can arbitrate accidents—was not sufficient as a factor in spurring the sales of this technology.
This changed in May 2012 when a dashcam footage of a violent accident became Singapore’s first viral video on YouTube. As Cheong and Chen (2015) note, the 29 second dashcam footage, uploaded by TheMockymocky, acquired 2.4 million views in the 5 days and gained over 5 million views over the next months. The footage opens with a predawn scene of a taxi moving off the traffic junction after the traffic lights turned green. Seconds later, it was barreled from the right by a speeding red Ferrari running the red light, causing the taxi to be hurled into the air. We later learn that the Ferrari was traveling at 178 km/h, many times the legal speed limit in Singapore (Teo, 2013). Mr. Ma Chi, a 31-year-old wealthy Chinese businessman driving the Ferrari, died in the collision; Mr. Cheng Teck Hock, the taxi driver and his passenger, Ms. Shigemi Ito, passed away in the hospital after.
The steep contrast in circumstances of the main parties involved—Mr. Ma, a Chinese immigrant who lives in a $2.2 million penthouse and drives a $1.4 million dollar supercar (Feng, 2012), and Mr. Cheng, a Singaporean working-class breadwinner, driving the taxi during the night shift to fund the education of his three children—sparked anti-immigrant resentment brewing in Singapore. Prior to the accident, Singapore was already facing significant strain from rising social inequalities and its visa policies. As S. Ang (2021) argues, faced with a rapidly rising immigrant population, strained public infrastructure, and a stagnating work economy, many local working and middle-class Singaporeans felt excluded from the country’s growing wealth, which they believe to be monopolized by the influx of foreigners. Several articles have already named this incident as one of the clearest instances of racial tensions in modern Singapore (Cheong & Chen, 2015; Yeoh & Lam, 2016). Little has been said, however, about how the dashcam translated the tensions around the accident into a new language of injury.
First, public resentment was fueled by the unequal reporting that took place after the accident. The first news report by the major English daily focused almost exclusively on Mr. Ma, describing him as a charitable donor and a “hard-working, righteous and loving father and husband” (Siau, 2012). As one blogger noted, the reporting made it appear as if Mr. Ma was the “‘undeserved’ victim” of the accident, killed by careless driving of Mr. Cheng, the taxi driver (Shen, 2012). Indeed, taxi drivers have been repeatedly singled out by authorities as the leading contributor to accidents on the island (Nadarajan, 2004). So, the initial generous portrayal of Mr. Ma inevitably stereotyped Mr. Cheng as a reckless taxi-driver that caused the death of a good man. However, this conclusion was overturned when the dashcam footage was released 2 days later, which made clear that the perpetrator of the accident was Mr. Ma instead. Reacting with outrage, the blogger asked: “What happened to the reporting about the
The point on the “real victims” shifts the accident into the political orbit of structural injury, where harm encounters differential degrees of recognition and address. More than a demand for individual justice, the issue of who can claim the status of victimhood centers on the kinds of lives valued and devalued by the State, the subjects who can be left to let die. As Judith Butler (2006, p. xv) explains, the political allocation of grief determines not only the subjects that must and must not be grieved; it also constitutes a scheme that produces “exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human.” To have grief be withdrawn is to mark life as less-than-human, inconsequential, and not normatively grievable.
In light of this, the dashcam footage served not only to expose the forensic truth of the accident (Siegel, 2014); it fundamentally challenged the biopolitical terms of injury levied on the working-class in Singapore. Notably, the footage itself was captured by another taxi driver, Mr. Yeo Kim Cheng, who was driving slightly behind Mr. Cheng at the accident. In interviews, Mr. Yeo explained that he bought the dashcam because he had been unjustly accused of causing accidents in the past. “A lot of people automatically blame taxi drivers for accidents, but the majority of us do follow the rules,” he explained (Tham, 2012). This same sense of injustice motivated him to share the footage on YouTube: “‘I wanted everyone to see that it wasn’t his [Mr. Cheng’s] fault. I wanted people to know the truth: that he hadn’t been driving recklessly” (Tham, 2012). The “truth” that Mr. Yeo wanted to promote, as such, represented more than the truth of who caused the accident—it sought to detail the routine injustice experienced by working-class drivers about claims to victimhood and sufferers of violence.
As is well documented, the footage galvanized many different parties. Many viewers left their sympathies to Mr. Cheng and his family in YouTube comments (TheMockymocky, 2012). Some citizen vigilantes investigated Mr. Ma’s background to raise doubts about the veracity of his spotless character (Cheong & Chen, 2015). Others went into a deeper analysis of the video to remove any doubt that Mr. Cheng was indeed the victim of the accident (Baby1M, 2012). Also, in a rare move, many government officials also came to the wake of Mr. Cheng and offered emotional and financial support to his wife and children (SPH Razor, 2013). This outcome of collective grief and assistance—incredible for a working-class taxi-driver, who is often seen as occupying one of the lower strata in society—was felt by many to depend on the dashcam. As a technology, the device fundamentally changed the narrative of the accident, testifying to the structural terms of injury, allowing Mr. Cheng to be posthumously raised as a figure of justice for those similarly downtrodden.
The market of dashcams
This incident redefined the meaning of dashcams, creating a market for the product. In Singapore, dashcam sales grew by as much as 50% after the crash (Hussain & Siau, 2013) and enabled the growth of dashcam communities (J. Lim, 2013). The YouTube channel SG Road Vigilante which had almost no activity in 2012, begun receiving a flood of videos from 2013 onwards. The YouTube community for Singapore Reckless Drivers was also set up in 2013, and the Road.sg domain in 2015. In line with Mr. Cheng’s accident, these communities presented dashcams as technologies of citizen vigilantism, a framework which the state and media organizations adopted. Community platform Stomp, which is owned by one of the largest media organizations in Singapore, awarded a dashcam video the inaugural “Citizen Journalism Award” in 2013 (Tan, 2013). Similarly, traffic authorities associated dashcams to a “neighbourhood watch group” (J. Lim, 2013), and actively encouraged the submission of dashcam videos for law enforcement (Hussain, 2015).
These developments relate to the growth of personal surveillance technologies in the 2010s, like mobile phone cameras and wearable body cameras. Providing what Mann and Ferenbok (2013) term “sousveillance,” these technologies offer marginalized communities a capacity to “look back” at institutions and individuals of authority, using surveillance to hold them accountable. The market for dashcams in Singapore must be understood in line with these developments. The dashcam allowed Mr. Cheng’s accident to take on a different narrative, and it expanded the participation possible in accidents. Those directly involved in accidents may use dashcams to vouch for their innocence, but people using and watching dashcams can also contribute as vigilantes and forensic detectives. Underlying such participation is also a belief that democratic participation can reduce possibilities of injustice in road accidents. The “objectivity” of visual evidence and the potential for its publicity drove the fantasy of sousveillance that is key to market appeal of dashcams.
But understanding dashcams as objective evidentiary technologies obscure the structural conditions of truth-telling unequally positioned along lines of race, class, and gender (Banet-Weiser & Higgins, 2023; Moore, 2022). This especially played out in the evolving relationship between dashcams and users. After 2013, taxi drivers increasingly found themselves denied of access to their dashcam footage despite its mandatory installation in fleet taxis (Woo, 2013). Citing privacy concerns and reasoning that dashcams were the property of the company, taxi drivers were required to request fleet operators for access to footage, even though the dashcams were installed in their vehicles (Woo, 2013). Also, food delivery workers are generally much less likely to possess dashcams due to the complexity of installing dashcams on motorbikes and bicycles—the dominant mode of transport for food delivery (INNOVV, 2024). As such, even as dashcams became an increasingly significant part of Singapore’s participatory media, its participation became even further entrenched along lines of class. Given the high cost of car-ownership in Singapore, the majority of dashcam drivers empowered to become citizen vigilantes are middle-class. Meanwhile, the workers who spend the most time on the roads are systematically denied a voice in representing their injuries.
These distinctions in dashcam ownership map the binaries of the videographer/videoed, Samaritan/victim and vigilante/injured along lines of class, which enables the extraction of value from the injury of working-class platform workers. The YouTube virality of Mr. Cheng’s accident, for instance, was predicated on two key factors: his vulnerability to injury and his working-class background. To support his family on meager earnings, Mr. Cheng was forced to work at night, increasing his risk of an accident (Tham, 2012). When the accident occurred, it was his idealized working-class identity—depicted as a hardworking father trying to raise three children on a modest income—that intensified the national and class tensions essential to YouTube virality (Cheong & Chen, 2015). As we will argue, these dynamics will continue to have significant implications for how the injuries of food delivery workers are monetized.
The economics of injury
The ubiquity of dashcam videos after 2013 led to the proliferation of dashcam communities on social media. Channels and sites like SG Road Vigilante, Singapore Reckless Drivers Community, Roads.sg, Beh Chia Lor, among others, garnered a huge following in Singapore. At time of writing, the largest, SG Road Vigilante, for instance, has more than 265,000 followers on Facebook, 63,000 subscribers on YouTube and more than 10,000 videos archived on its YouTube channel. Taken together, the four sites have more than 700,000 followers on Facebook, no mean feat given their geographic focus on Singapore, a nation-state with a population of approximately 6 million in 2023.
Our analysis in the following is developed through a reading of dashcam footages involving food delivery workers submitted to the channel SG Road Vigilante on YouTube. A search conducted with the term “Food Delivery” on 25 March 2024 returned a total of 497 videos. Videos irrelevant to the subject were removed, leaving 160 videos. More than half (57%) of the videos involve accidents, while the others spotlight bad traffic behavior by food delivery workers. Both authors agreed on the classification, and reviewed and analyzed the dashcam videos jointly.
The majority of dashcam videos follow a standard structure. Most are shot by a car traveling behind the accident. The initial segment is usually mundane, showing the dashcam driver navigating ordinary traffic. The accident that follows is unexpected. In some of these videos, the moment of the accident would be repeated in slow-motion with commentary, sometimes with multiple angles if the car has a rear dashcam. The title and accompanying description typically look factual: it will state the parties involved, their vehicle registration numbers, and the date and time of the accident. A watermark of the channel accompanies many videos.
An archetype of this format is the 24 June 2022 accident at Waterway Point mall (SG Road Vigilante, 2022). The accident involves a food delivery rider on a power-assisted bicycle colliding into the side of the white lorry at the carpark exit. The first segment, lasting a second, shows the short moment of the collision. This moment is repeated twice, once in slow-motion, suggesting a forensic analytical eye. Then the video switches to the contextual scene of the drive, covering the periods before the accident to the aftermath. The last scene which shows the rider’s motionless body—adorned in the bright green uniform of Grab—takes up the majority of video, lasting for almost 2 minutes.
These different segments of the video converge to render the dashcam footage a form of forensic spectatorship for social media (Moore, 2022). YouTube’s policy on graphic content states that “footage . . . involving road accidents” would be removed unless it is deemed to be of “educational” value (YouTube Help, 2024). The forensic purpose of the video—referenced in the video title and initial segment—is the portions that solidify the “educational” value of the video that allows it to stay online (Siegel, 2014). In the 24 June 2022 Waterway Point accident, debate ensued in the comments on YouTube and other social media platforms about fault, since it appeared as if the food delivery worker had swerved directly into the road to hit the lorry. “The title ‘Lorry hit biker’ is so wrong, it’s the bike that hit the lorry,” expressed @JJ-zu5cg (2022). This determination, however, was challenging because the dashcam was a distance from the site of collision, making it impossible to see detail in the accident and to certify why and if the food delivery rider had made the mistake.
The ambiguity of forensics suggests that the viral engagement of the video—on YouTube alone, over 46,000 views and 148 comments—must have relied on something more than straightforward forensics. Much of platform labor literature has raised “precarity” as the key culprit of accidents, associating the disposability of marginalized workers as reason for the high rates of accidents (Mathews et al., 2022; Orr et al., 2023). This maps the injury of platform gig workers to other risky working-class occupations, like construction workers and miners (Sellers & Melling, 2012). Yet, in none of those occupations do we see a similar public archive of visual injury. To understand the value-generating potential of this archive, it is necessary to interrogate the different ways that vulnerability can be profited from. As James Tyner (2019) notes in Dead Labor, the exploitation of workers can happen both in life and death. He names the latter as “derivative violence,” offering that commercial value can be excavated from the death of workers through mechanisms like workers’ insurance.
Derivative violence lends well to the consideration of virality in dashcam videos of platform workers. There are at least three elements to this: the frequency in which their bodies can be mined for content, the engagement produced of their injury, and the ease by which they enter social media circuits for spectatorship. First, there is a quantitative relationship between the vulnerability of platform workers and the frequency with which their bodies are displayed on YouTube. The 497 videos with the term “food delivery” in the title and description on SG Road Vigilante reflect the inherent risks of food delivery work: the occupational hazards of road accidents (Kok, 2022) and platform-imposed time pressures that incentivize speeding and dangerous driving maneuvers (Mathews et al., 2022). This vulnerability creates an abundant supply of content. Workers are depicted not only in moments of injury but also in scenarios of reckless driving and altercations, providing material that elicits a wide range of emotional responses from audiences (Burgess & Green, 2018).
This quantitative aspect, however, explains only part of value generation. Equally important is the engagement these videos foster. For example, dashcam videos featuring food delivery workers consistently attract higher-than-average viewership than regular dashcam footage in the SG Road Vigilante channel. Most garner over 10,000 views, with some exceeding 100,000, positioning food delivery accidents as significant contributors to the channel’s 2.8 billion monthly views.
This tendency can be attributed to the occupational identity of food delivery platform workers. While critical scholars have typically used “platform workers” as an occupational term (Gandini, 2021), it is also crucial to remember that platforms operate as technologies of affective connection (Steinberg & Li, 2017). Studies on social media virality has demonstrated that virality is often underpinned by relatability, an affective bond formed between creators and audiences (Abidin, 2015; Soriano & Cabalquinto, 2022). Typically, relatability is carefully crafted by influencers, but in the case of platform work, the job itself facilitates this connection (Soriano & Cabalquinto, 2022). Personal and impersonal interactions with food delivery workers on roads, in offices, buildings, and malls foster an affective connection that drives YouTube engagement (Burgess & Green, 2018).
The comments on the Waterway Point video on YouTube illustrate this dynamic, with viewers frequently referencing both the accident and the nature of food delivery work. Comments expressing irritation (“These food delivery riders are very reckless,” @mosessim446, 2022), sympathy (“If one chiong maybe can earn 4-7k a month. But at what cost? Your life and health?,” @fez877, 2022), and anger (“Bicycles and PABs doing delivery . . . you lot always filter out without looking,” @edmondg8942, 2022) link the specifics of the accident with personal sentiments about food delivery work, with the latter enhancing the emotional resonance of the former.
In this sense, the commercial value of injury is not solely contained in its spectacle; it also resides in the relatable meanings tied to food delivery work itself. We began this paper with the example of the food delivery worker Mr. Teo, who was knocked over and killed by a drunk driver in March 2021 during a delivery (Lay, 2021a). The circumstances of this accident—the overnight shift, the contrast between a yellow Mini Cooper and an electric-powered bicycle, his portrayal as a devoted working-class father to a young daughter—bear striking similarities to the life and death of Mr. Cheng, the taxi-driver. Similar in both accidents too are the affective investments in dashcams. In both instances, dashcams were positioned as technologies that can right structural injustice, fueling the enthusiastic vigilantism of Singaporean dashcam communities (Baby1M, 2012; Lay, 2021b). Nearly a decade separates Mr. Cheng from Mr. Teo, yet dashcams continue to generate value from the violence experienced by gig and platform workers.
To be clear, dashcams do have political potential. The vividness of injury captured by dashcams is positioned to evoke indignation (A. Ang, 2022) and likely contributed to the passing of the Platform Workers Bill, which increased the compensation workers can receive in the event of accidents (Kok, 2024). Also, while the deaths of Mr. Cheng and Mr. Teo were tragic, the outpouring of concern must have offered some material and emotional solace to family members. Dashcams offer potential for personal tragedies to find solidarity, especially among online communities (Banet-Weiser & Higgins, 2023).
Nonetheless, in its pursuit of objectifying visual evidence, dashcams have also narrowed the boundaries in which injury can be articulated, making it particularly difficult for workers to claim control over the narrative of their own injury. For example, none of the 160 videos reviewed came from the dashcams of delivery workers. In fact, platform workers are often put in a precarious position where they must plead for evidence of their injuries because they do not have dashcams installed on their vehicles (Lay, 2021a). But even if they do have dashcams, the lack of educational literacy and fear of legal reprisal impede platform workers’ ability to participate in dashcam discussions on equal terms (Hong, 2024). These dynamics remind us that evidentiary technologies are not neutral tools of truth-telling. The terms under which workers can access and articulate “truth” are shaped by existing structures of power.
These factors also underscore the ease with which the injuries of platform workers can be transformed into commercial value. Consider, for example, the broader implications of dashcam ownership. Because dashcams are the property of car-owning drivers, accident victims often have little power to control the terms of their appearance. For instance, no one questioned the 2-minute recording of the lifeless body in the Waterway Point accident (SG Road Vigilante, 2022). Family members of the deceased worker, likely from a working-class background, have limited means to challenge how the video was displayed and circulated.
In many of these cases too, the material conditions of platform work are critical to the spectacle of injury. Because food delivery workers frequently use motorcycles and bicycles, their faces and bodies are more likely to be exposed and made a part of the aesthetics of the accident. As example, one of the most viral dashcam videos of 2024 shows a close-up of a rider’s face as he collides with a rear-facing dashcam (SG Road Vigilante, 2024, 106,000 views). In this case, the virality of the video depended on the worker’s face, which was ridiculed for his comical expression as his mobility scooter surged forward and slammed into the car. The public shaming of the worker is supported by a belief of vigilantism: a belief that the worker is at fault for the accident and should be held accountable for the damage to the car. However, the arrival of this conclusion is noticeably absent of the worker’s voice. And if the worker was delivering food for a platform, why not hold the platform accountable too? The broader structural conditions of platform work were left out of consideration.
Here, platform work intersects with the extraction of value in two ways: not only does the mode of transport make food delivery injury more spectacular and germane to YouTube virality, it also makes the commercialization of injury safer. The forensics instilled of dashcam videos coupled with the financial lack of platform workers, insulates uploaders (like SG Road Vigilante) from takedowns and legal reprisals, which enable the wanton commercialization of platform worker injuries. Profit from YouTube virality is undivorceable from the powerlessness of workers. Workers’ inability to easily participate in discussions about their own injuries renders them docile subjects, incapable of questioning the gratuitous violence or ridicule showcased in dashcam footage. Vulnerability—whether structural, material, or occupational—converge to make food delivery injuries readily available for recording, circulation, and spectatorship in the platform economy.
Dashcam ambivalence
These cases illustrate the entanglement of dashcams and injury in Singapore, particularly for platform workers who are placed in circumstances predisposed to harms. The dashcam is a securitizing type of forensic media: it relies on a perceived climate of injury to sell well. Its product is not so much an audiovisual recording than the promise of a fair arbitration: evidence that can mediate an accident and dispute, reducing the likelihood of injustice levied by police, lawyers, and insurers, buttressed by the “truth” that can potentially emergence from the marketplace of platformed deliberation.
In these ways, dashcams both perpetuate and resist injury. In an injurious climate, dashcams offer forensic evidence that can challenge biopolitical terms of blame weighed against the working class. As the history of dashcams in Singapore suggests, this type of protection is of no minor significance to the normalization of the device. However, this comes as a compromise. Structural injury can find its truth only when injury becomes subject to platform virality, when footage of broken bodies become available for public scrutiny, subject to the uncertain terms of decision, for the possibility of public indignation. Meanwhile, injury continues to be capitalized upon: as monetizable views, dismissed as accidental outcomes, and things that can be addressed with the technological device of the dashcam.
In doing so, these images/videos of injury take the ambivalent contradiction of an ethical pursuit of justice and unethical consumption of suffering. In fact, the generative potential of each is dependent on the other. These two forces—one which draws attention to the injurious conditions of extraction, and the other that relies on injury for profit—are constantly held in tension as conjoint elements. One easy answer to this is that we can enhance the good, as well as reduce the bad, by controlling the terms of dashcam mediation. But that answer also brings dashcams closer to the core fantasy of platform capitalism: that the mediality of the platform can be adjusted as if it were a dial, reducing the bad, while increasing the good (Mattern, 2021). But relations—good or bad—do not exist in a container. They are also mediated by the colonial histories that have culturally made Asia (Udupa & Dattatreyan, 2023; Zhang & Chen, 2022). The monetization of injury in Singapore is one example of this. Addressing the potentiality of dashcam and its affective dimensions, therefore, requires a careful address of those histories, to surface the possibility embedded in its outrage against violence and inequality.
