Security-camera footage, body-cam footage, Ring footage: In the year 2026, when video bearing the visual signatures of surveillance comes across our social media feeds, we know what to expect. Some deviation from the norm is coming. Something frightening, weird, funny. Something is going to happen.
No variety of surveillance video is more transfixing than footage from the road, captured by individual drivers’ dash cams. Here we have harrowing accidents, near misses, people being annoying or stupid — and also spirited debates, in the comments, about who’s truly at fault or whether the whole thing is fake.
In a recent video that captures the current state of this subgenre, the footage is split in two: a view of a woman driving juxtaposed with the simultaneous view from her car’s rear window. The video’s YouTube title — “Teen Driver Who Tries Hit-and-Run Gets INSTANT Karma!” — makes sure we know the type of payoff we’re sticking around for. We watch as a pickup truck approaches too fast, clips her rear bumper, then swerves away. She gasps in shock, then grins and gives chase.
We know from the start that the pickup driver won’t escape consequences — it’s a “karma” video, the plot points toward comeuppance — and eventually he pulls over. “I have dash cameras,” the woman who got hit calls out in a gotcha voice. “Yup. Front and back.”
Posted in July, the video has millions of views, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s the suspense (will there be a crash?), a dangling promise of punishment (what form will “INSTANT Karma!” take?) and lots of room for the viewer’s judgment (not just of the truck driver but of the woman chasing him). Many commenters cheer her quick thinking and willingness to stick up for herself. Others are critical, noting that in her enthusiastic pursuit she blows through a stop sign or two, with a child in the back seat who looks pretty terrified and whom we never hear her acknowledge.
When they first came on the market, consumer dash cams had a cultural purpose that had nothing to do with social media clout. Most histories of the technology identify the dash cam’s spiritual home — the place where it really took off en masse — as Russia. There, sometime in the 2000s, they became a de rigueur accessory for warding off corrupt cops and fraudsters looking to enmesh people in fake accidents: They were protection against scammers who threw themselves at your bumper and claimed you hit them.
Average Russians accumulated countless hours of boring footage of Russian roads and Russian traffic. There’s an audience for stuff like this — search YouTube for “Russia dash cam relaxing” or “Russia driving ASMR,” and you’ll see — but it’s relatively niche, like the audience for art house “film essays.” In 2013, though, the Russian dash-cam genre produced a global hit after several drivers inadvertently captured the explosion of a meteor over the city of Chelyabinsk. This wasn’t plotless footage to zone out to; it was an astronomical event, the stuff of online content creators’ dreams. For many American viewers, this was their introduction to the consumer dash cam as content machine.
As more Americans started to buy dash cams, most were probably motivated, like so many Russians before them, by the need to prove their innocence. But the endless digital footage became, for some, more than that. Drivers didn’t just accumulate evidence of their own blamelessness — they also trawled for footage that suited the tastes of the attention economy.
As in Russia, the spectrum ran from the soothingly mundane to intense: road rage confrontation, wildfires, tornadoes, airplanes making emergency landings on highways, a UPS jet exploding. In 2024, a viral dash-cam video captured people intentionally backing a car into an unsuspecting victim’s car on the Belt Parkway in Queens. The perpetrators pleaded guilty to insurance fraud in August and have been sentenced. This was a turning point in American dash-cam content; never before had the technology’s twinned potentials for user protection and online popularity been on such intense display.
“Pics or it didn’t happen,” went the mantra of the old social internet. Now it’s something more like “video all the time, in case something happens,” especially in cases where the filming can be framed as a responsible act. Government surveillance might give us the creeps, but personal surveillance is increasingly normalized. You should have a dash cam — for insurance purposes. You should set up a doorbell camera at your mom’s house — in case someone kidnaps her. Responsible behavior or click harvesting: Who can say where one stops and the other starts? Some people are now becoming dedicated dash-cam influencers. They’re not harvesting footage on the way to work; they’re driving around harvesting footage for work.
Views are one metric of success online; views that lead to sales are even better. So it’s no surprise that lots of dash-cam videos come with product links attached. In fact, the “Instant Karma!” video was first posted by a dash-cam company. “Police arrived to the scene and gave him 4 citations because of the footage!” reads concluding text on the screen. “NEVER drive without video evidence!” (The company told me the video was sent to them by a happy customer, with whom they reached an agreement to use it on their socials.)
When you know this context and watch the video enough times, the eagerness on the woman’s face and in her voice takes on another dimension. She hasn’t just caught the kid who swiped her; she has captured something that has value online. Something has happened — and now she might be able to make the most of it.
Peter C. Baker is a writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes.”
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