The Age of the Strategist: The Fantasy of Freedom
In a culture where everyone is a brand, control feels like liberation but the fantasy of freedom might be the most marketable illusion of all.
Marisol Del Rey 🌙
Oct 25, 2025
There was a time when fame felt distant. It felt like something that lived behind the glass, bright and unreachable. Now it flashes in the palm of your hand. Every feed is a stage. Every face is an announcement. Every word, a wager. We no longer chase fame itself. We chase adjacency. Closeness to someone, something, or some image that radiates power. To live online is to live in the shadow of recognition. You can feel it even in silence. In this world, proximity has replaced merit. To exist is to curate. To survive is to strategize. In that liminal space between the visible and the ignored, a new instinct forms, the strategist.
Everyone is a strategist now. Even myself. We do not simply post, we calibrate. We speak in captions. We angle our laughter for a camera. We translate our inner lives into algorithms of relatability. We shape our tones to match whatever will be read as informed but not threatening, ahead of the trends and marketable. The self becomes a long running campaign, a brand deck of our best hits. It becomes a negotiation between visibility and safety. What once belonged to marketing departments now belongs to everyone. The optics, engagement, and consistency. We are little publicists managing the optics of our own existence.
The strategist’s eye does not stop at the screen. It travels inward, into the body. Proximity to power is no longer measured by who you know but it is measured in who knows you, how you look, how you carry yourself, and how successfully or unsuccessfully you perform control. There is a quiet cruelty in proximity not only social but bodily. The body itself has become a press release.
We live in a culture that rewards the illusion of access. You do not have to have power. You just need to be close enough to it to convince others you belong in the room. The proximity economy runs on suggestions like hair implies health, skin that implies age, and a waistline that implies discipline. The right image opens doors and the wrong image locks them quietly. The new morality is visual. The good citizen glows. Wellness has become the secular religion of a disenchanted era. It runs its rituals on green juice, silent retreats, and ring light confessionals.
Our political language mirrors it. It becomes order disguised as freedom and optimization disguised as care. In this atmosphere, fatness is treated like a choice. To be large is to be read as careless, unstrategic, and unserious. Fatphobia becomes the etiquette of power. Never explicit and always implied. It is embedded in who the camera flatters and whose ambition is “inspirational” versus “delusional.” This control is a mirage. The more we chase it, the less human we become. A chemical managed appetite is not freedom. It is an algorithm written into the bloodstream.
Under the current administration, the rhetoric of control seeps easily into the language of health. “Personal responsibility,” “self-discipline,” “freedom from dependence.” These phrases are meant to sound virtuous double as dog whistles for bodily conformity. The fit body is proof of moral order. The undisciplined body and the evidence of decline. This logic gives rise to the era’s favorite miracle, Ozempic. A drug that promises mastery in a syringe. It erases appetite, smooths chaos, and makes control visible. The Ozempic body does not just look small, it looks compliant. It looks like it is following instructions. But discipline, in this culture, is not a cure, it is a performance.
Ozempic sells the fantasy that discipline can be outsourced, and that the messy negotiation between hunger and self can be rewritten pharmacologically. It allows people to embody virtue without wrestling with it. It is a chemical shortcut to social belonging. The age of Ozempic is not just about medicine, it is about marketing. For some, it is a legitimate and even life changing treatment and a medical necessity that deserves respect and access without stigma. But culturally, it has become something else entirely like a symbol of status and a shortcut to moral credibility. In a culture that worships optics, Ozempic becomes the perfect sacrament. It is scientific proof that you have learned to disappear gracefully.
Fatphobia, in this system, functions like quality control. It enforces the hierarchy of who appears employable, desirable, and credible. It whispers that thinness is professionalism, that smallness is grace. The Ozempic boom fits neatly into this equation. It sells an upgraded interface and the body as a streamlined operating system. It offers efficiency in a world that has replaced meaning with metrics. People do not want to be healthy, they want to look controlled. The transformation, the before and after, feeds the culture of optimization. “Control” becomes our collective fantasy, the new American dream. It is not about who you are but how well you contain yourself and containment is a lonely skill.
The strategists are not born, they are manufactured. Raised by platforms that reward conformity and punished by algorithms. Power has changed shape. It no longer hides behind marble columns or military parades. It hides behind wellness slogans, behind filters, behind the rhetoric of freedom. It convinces you that the cage is self care. This is what makes control so seductive that it feels voluntary. You buy the products, follow the routines, count the calories, and post the proof. You call it empowerment, but it is obedience. Governance has become internalized. The state does not need to enforce order when we police ourselves so efficiently. The camera in our heads does all the work. Every mirror becomes a checkpoint. Every reflection, a performance review. We are not being watched, we have learned to watch ourselves.
The strategist’s world is small and surveilled. Every gesture, every outfit, every opinion is an audition for belonging. The algorithm rewards predictability, not authenticity, control, not curiosity. Even authenticity has been domesticated. We perform rawness in curated doses, the tearful and vulnerable confessions that doubles as an engagement strategy. The self that once rebelled against corporate America now submits to it, hoping for mercy. What we forget is that strategy was once a response to danger.
For marginalized people, women, queer folks, immigrants, image management was survival. You learned to read the room before you entered it. You self monitored tone, posture, and dress not for clout but for safety. The tragedy of the present is that this survival skill has become the default mode of existence for everyone. We are all strategists now even when no one is looking. Especially then. The proximity economy thrives on self surveillance. You must monitor how you are perceived to stay employable, datable, even lovable. Desire itself has been professionalized. Swipe culture teaches us to market ourselves like start-ups. We perform in short bios, clear branding, and visual proof of “value.”
What is crueler than the rules are the fears they plant. The threat of punishment works better than punishment itself because it is invisible. You start imagining the judgment before it ever arrives. The fear of failure becomes its own discipline. You shrink your appetite before anyone calls you greedy and dim your ambition before anyone calls you arrogant. Society does not need to enforce its standards when fear does the labor for free. Most of us are not obeying rules anymore. We are obeying anticipation of the quiet dread of what might happen if we ever stopped performing control.
Individuality sells itself as freedom, but it is really control. The system that protects power by convincing us that unity is a threat to selfhood. The loneliness epidemic is not accidental, it is manufactured. Isolation keeps us loyal to systems that promise connection while profiting from our separation. Social media platforms, chatbots, and pop stars are carrots that keep us from rebelling. The stick is what happens if you stop consuming. The same source that delivers the reward also enforces obedience.We are told that solitude is empowerment and that interdependence is weakness. A culture that keeps people isolated also keeps them manageable. When connection becomes optional and competition becomes moral, solidarity starts to look suspicious. The more we retreat into our curated selves, the harder it becomes to recognize each other as part of something larger. That is the final illusion of control, not just to be free, but to be free alone.
Maybe that is why everyone wants to scam the system. Not in the grand, criminal sense, but in the moral one. It is a quiet calculation that says, if the game is rigged, you might as well join them. It is the cultural mood to play the game, play the tax code, play the algorithm, and play morality itself. The current administration mirrors that logic. Power behaves like the ultimate scammer, breaking its own rules and house, while preaching discipline and patriotism to everyone else. It is not governance anymore, it is influence. It is strategy over integrity. The scammer becomes a folk hero because they embody the fantasy of freedom under corruption. The people watch the reality tv show that is the U.S and vicariously live in reality where they get away with it when everyone else has to perform obedience. It is Animal Farm rewritten for the algorithmic age, but the pigs have learned to code and the rest of us call it content.
Somewhere beneath that performance is the oldest illusion of all, us versus them. Every scam needs an enemy to justify itself, “them” who hoards, controls, and deceives first. However, the question now is who are they now? The elites? The media? The institutions? Or anyone who still believes in democracy? The line keeps moving until no one is innocent. We have all started to think like the system we claim to resist. That is how a figure like Trump becomes more than a politician, he becomes a parable. The performance is the point.
He does not sell policy, he sells permission. To his followers, even to the people that oppose him, every violation reads as victory, and every evasion as proof of genius. In a culture where everyone secretly wants to cheat the algorithm, his administration is the algorithmic incarnate. What used to read as corruption now reads as courage. It is the strategist’s dream played out on a national scale. The belief that rule breaking is the last form of authenticity left.
The strategist in each of us is tired. Everyone wants to be a strategist because no one wants to remember how to be human. Being tired of managing perception, tired of performing control, and tired of rehearsing existence is a reminder of our reality. We crave the unfiltered and timeless, yet fear its consequences. The internet is forever and human demise is inevitable. The digital casino becomes a glass cage and coffin. We talk about freedom, but what we want is permission. To exist without having to explain, justify, resize, or edit ourselves into palatable shapes. But permission does not come from power. It comes from fatigue, from the emotions that are not PR friendly, and the quiet refusal to play along. Refusal and unmarketable emotions are the new radical acts. Not a loud refusal or the kind that still performs, but the soft, persistent kind. Eating when you are hungry, resting when you are tired, and letting your body exist without apology. To take up space is to interrupt the optics of control. Unmarketable emotion does not convert. It cannot be monetized, optimized, or redeemed. But that is also what makes it real. These are the emotions that do not ask for engagement, they ask for witnesses. To feel them is to step outside the loop of strategy and let yourself exist without being usable.
Yet between the strategist and the world builder lives another figure, the improviser. The improviser does not live entirely inside the cage, nor fully outside it. She understands the game well enough to disrupt it from within, bending the rules just long enough to make something unexpected happen. Improvisation is a kind of micro freedom, a fleeting resistance that does not destroy the system but exposes its fragility. It reminds us that rebellion is not always grand. Sometimes it is a quick detour, a joke, a glitch that momentarily rewrites the code of obedience.
Maybe the opposite of strategy is world building. The strategist reacts and the world builder imagines. Strategy is survival inside a cage, but world building is what happens when you realize you can make the walls melt. To be a world builder is to stop asking how to fit and start asking what could exist if we stopped designing ourselves for approval. It means shifting from optimization to creation, from marketing to meaning. It is building subcultures, collectives, friendships, and futures that do not require permission. The strategist lives in fear of being misread and the world builder writes new languages. We cannot outplay the systems that raised us, but we can out dream them. That is where freedom stops being a fantasy and starts becoming a practice.
There is an old story and meme about two wolves living inside each of us, one fueled by fear and the other by hope. The strategist feeds the first, the one that worries, calculates, and controls. The world builder feeds the second, the one that imagines, creates, and connects. Every post, every choice, and every breath is a question of nourishment. To starve the strategist is not to abandon survival, it is to refuse a life built entirely around defense. But to starve the world builder is its own kind of hunger, the feeling of being “big” only because the world you inhabit has become so small.
It is hard not to think of The Truman Show. Truman’s world is perfectly controlled, perfectly curated, and built entirely for the comfort of those watching. Every gesture, every friendship, every horizon is manufactured. It is an ecosystem of obedience disguised as normal life. He is both the star and the labor, the entertainment and the product. That is what strategy does, it convinces you the stage is the world. The audience cheers his happiness, then panics when he begins to want something unscripted. The moment Truman touches the wall of his own reality is the moment control collapses. It is not rebellion that saves him but curiosity.
Maybe the strategist built the stage but the world builder can destroy the script. The question is not how to be seen. It is what we are willing to destroy to see clearly. Power’s worst fear is not protest but imagination. You cannot police what has not been invented yet. You can’t censor a world still being drawn in someone’s mind. That is why every empire rewards its strategists but fears its dreamers. The strategist sustains illusion but the world builder remembers it was never real. The strategist serves the empire but the world builder forgets it exists. Freedom does not arrive in filters or policies. It begins when we stop curating our humanity and start living in it, unscripted, and out of frame. The strategist keeps the show running but the world builder is the one who looks up. Sees the painted sky, and walks through it. Reminds us that the exit was never locked.