Dear David, We're Alone Now

Dear David, We’re Alone Now sits within the Dear David series, which uses the form of a love letter to address surveillance as an intimate, gendered relationship rather than a neutral system. David is both a specific operator, working as CCTV Data Manager for the last 29 years at Transport for London and a composite figure drawn from the history of CCTV in the UK: a technology expanded in the late 20th century under the promise of public safety, deterrence, and administrative oversight, but sustained through constant, unequal looking.

This letter explicitly draws on documented practices from early CCTV culture, including accounts of operators recording and circulating sexual encounters in spaces informally known as “Shaggers Alley,” compiling them into internal “greatest hits” reels for entertainment. By invoking this history, the letter reframes surveillance as a sexual economy built on access without consent.

OONA stages a flirtation that is also an accusation, collapsing private desire and institutional behavior into the same gesture. Humor and menace coexist to expose how intimacy, archiving, and power have always been entangled in the history of watching.