Producing Value From Injury: Dashcam Platforms, Accidents, and Gig Work

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.