October 5, 2026

In ‘Producing Value from Injury: Dashcam Platforms, Accidents, and Gig Work’ (Social Media + Society, 2025), Assistant Professor Renyi Hong (NUS Communications and New Media) and Assistant Professor Kuansong Victor Zhuang (Nanyang Technological University) examine how dashcam technologies in Singapore have become entangled with the political economy of platform labour. Focusing on food delivery riders, they argue that dashcams do not merely document accidents or provide neutral evidence. Instead, they operate as platformed media infrastructures that simultaneously promise justice while enabling the extraction of economic and affective value from workers’ injuries.

The article opens with a series of disturbing but familiar images circulating on Singaporean social media: bloodied riders, mangled bicycles, and delivery bags strewn across the road. These images, often captured by car-mounted dashcams and uploaded to platforms such as SG Road Vigilante, have become a dominant visual archive of gig work injury. Hong and Zhuang show how dashcams frame these incidents as isolated ‘accidents’, even as they obscure the structural conditions of platform labour—tight delivery deadlines, algorithmic pressure, and inadequate protections—that make such injuries routine rather than exceptional.

Tracing the rise of dashcams in Singapore, the authors situate their widespread adoption within a locally specific history of road congestion, citizen vigilantism, and state surveillance. A pivotal moment is the 2012 Ferrari-taxi crash, one of Singapore’s first viral dashcam videos, which revealed how visual evidence could overturn elite-biased narratives of blame and momentarily reframe working-class drivers as legitimate victims. This episode helped establish dashcams as technologies of public truth and justice, fuelling their commercial uptake and the growth of social media communities dedicated to uploading and scrutinising road footage.

Yet Hong and Zhuang demonstrate that this promise of justice is deeply ambivalent. While dashcams can expose wrongdoing and galvanise public sympathy, they also reproduce stark inequalities in who gets to record, circulate, and interpret injury. Most dashcam footage is captured by car owners—typically middle-class—while delivery riders, who spend the most time on the roads, rarely possess the means to document their own accidents. As a result, platform workers appear overwhelmingly as filmed subjects rather than speaking agents, their injuries rendered into content for forensic debate, moral judgement, and online entertainment.

The authors argue that this asymmetry enables what they term the ‘capitalisation of injury’. Videos involving food delivery riders attract disproportionately high viewership and engagement, driven by the relatability of platform work and the emotional charge of visible harm. Injury becomes valuable not only as evidence but as spectacle: monetised through views, advertising revenue, and platform attention, while workers themselves remain excluded from the economic gains generated by their suffering. In this sense, dashcams function as platform-like intermediaries that extract value from vulnerability under the guise of safety and accountability.

Hong and Zhuang caution against viewing dashcams as either purely emancipatory or purely exploitative technologies. Instead, they highlight their dual role as tools that can both contest and reproduce structural injustice. Addressing the harms faced by platform workers, they suggest, requires more than better evidence or improved media visibility. It demands a deeper reckoning with how technological infrastructures, labour precarity, and long-standing inequalities shape whose injuries are seen, whose voices are heard, and who ultimately benefits from the circulation of harm.

Read the article here.