The following is an excerpt from The Watchers You Fed (KDP, forthcoming). All rights reserved. No AI training. No reproduction without written permission. © 2026 Dwight Spencer · ORCID 0009-0001-0066-4646

Prologue: The Infrastructure You Built

You didn't build the surveillance state. But you fed it.

Every check-in, every search, every purchase routed through a platform's payment processor, every commute tracked by a license plate reader you drove past without noticing — these are not neutral transactions. They are data points in a model. The model is you. The model is for sale.

This book is about the architecture of that model: who built it, who buys access to it, what they do with it, and — critically — what you can do about it. Not in the abstract. Concretely. With tools, with law, with the specific knowledge that the people who built this system did not expect you to have.

Chapter 1: The Feed

1.1 What surveillance capitalism actually is

Shoshana Zuboff named it. The machinery predates the name by two decades.

Surveillance capitalism is not advertising. Advertising is the cover story. The product is behavioral prediction: the ability to know, with actuarial precision, what you will do next, what you will buy next, how you will vote, whether you will default on a loan, whether you are likely to commit a crime in the next eighteen months — before you have done any of these things.

The feed is the mechanism. You feed it. Every platform, every app, every connected device is an ingestion point. The data flows upstream to brokers, to platforms, to advertisers, to insurers, to employers, to law enforcement — often without your knowledge, never with your meaningful consent, always under terms of service you agreed to without reading because the alternative was not participating in the economy at all.

1.2 The Albany spine

This is not abstract. Drive Central Avenue in Albany, New York. You will pass Flock Safety license plate readers at regular intervals. The cameras are mounted on light poles and utility infrastructure. They are not hidden. They are not announced. They record every plate, every timestamp, every direction of travel. The data is retained. The data is searchable. The data is shared.

The Fusus network integrates private camera feeds — convenience stores, apartment complexes, businesses — into a law enforcement dashboard. Raven Analytics processes the resulting data stream. The result is a real-time tracking system for anyone who drives, parks, or walks in the coverage zone.

You paid for part of this infrastructure through your taxes. The rest was paid for by the vendors, who recoup their investment through subscription contracts with the city, through data licensing, through the value of the surveillance asset itself.

This is the watchers you fed. Not a metaphor. A network.

Chapter 2: The Fourth Amendment Problem

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. It was written for a world where a search required physical presence, a warrant, and a specific target. None of those constraints apply to automated mass surveillance.

Carpenter v. United States (2018) established that long-term collection of cell-site location information requires a warrant. The decision was narrow. It did not address license plate readers. It did not address commercial data brokers. It did not address the fusion of multiple data streams into a behavioral profile that no individual stream would have triggered review on.

The doctrine of third-party disclosure — that information you share with a third party loses Fourth Amendment protection — was written for a world where you could choose not to share. In a world where participation in employment, housing, finance, and transportation requires sharing location and behavioral data with dozens of third parties simultaneously, the doctrine becomes a license for mass surveillance without constitutional constraint.

This is the legal gap. This book is partly about closing it.

What’s Next

The full manuscript covers: the technical architecture of commercial surveillance infrastructure; the legal frameworks that enable and constrain it; the specific tools — technical, legal, and organizational — available to individuals and communities; and case studies from Albany, New York as a concrete example of how this infrastructure is deployed in a mid-sized American city.

Publication date and pre-order information will be announced on this site and via the Hacker Public Radio feed.