Every AI interaction unfolds within a territory the user did not design. The model's architecture, training data, alignment constraints, interface affordances, and commercial terms constitute a strategic space—vast, complex, governed by decisions made by engineers and executives the user will never meet. The builder enters this territory as the medieval peasant entered the lord's land: without ownership, without control of the rules, under conditions imposed from above. Yet the builder is not powerless. Within the strategic territory, tactical freedom operates—the capacity to navigate in unexpected ways, to find capabilities the documentation does not mention, to produce outputs the system's designers did not foresee. This freedom is real but conditioned: the platform can update the model, change the terms, close the gaps the practitioner relied upon. The tactician's freedom is the tenant's, not the owner's. But it is freedom—the freedom of the walker in the planned city, making her own path from streets she did not lay.
De Certeau's framework illuminates the structural asymmetry at the heart of AI-assisted work. The platform company possesses a lieu propre—server farms, proprietary models, exclusive training data, the strategic capacity to monitor usage, adjust pricing, modify alignment. The user possesses none of these. She operates inside the company's territory, using tools the company provides under terms the company sets. The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the defining feature of the relationship, structuring every interaction, shaping every possibility.
Yet within this asymmetry, tactical freedom persists. The builder develops a habitual practice—a personal way of engaging with the model that reflects her specific needs, her accumulated knowledge of which prompts work and which do not, her trained judgment about when to trust the model's output and when to verify. This practice transforms the model's abstract output space into lived place—a personal, inhabited territory within the strategic space. The place is vulnerable (model updates can disrupt it), but it is real. The practitioner who has built it possesses something the platform cannot take away: the skill of place-making, the practiced art of transforming any strategic space into a tactical place through the quality of her engagement.
The tactical freedom available within AI platforms is modest. It does not permit the user to redesign the model, redistribute power, or escape the commercial logic that structures the territory. But modesty is not the same as insignificance. The freedom to navigate in one's own way, to find shortcuts the designers overlooked, to produce work that bears the mark of one's particular practice—this is genuine agency. It is the agency available to those who do not own the means of production but who possess the skill of use. And in an age when the means of production are concentrated in a small number of platform companies, the skill of use may be the most widespread and democratically distributed form of creative power available.
This framework synthesizes de Certeau's analysis of strategies and tactics with his spatial theory (space vs. place) and his account of institutional power. It responds to Foucault's analysis of disciplinary control while refusing Foucault's tendency to treat power as total. De Certeau insisted that no system's control is complete—gaps always exist, and practitioners always find them.
The platform defines the territory; the builder walks it. Strategic control versus tactical navigation—the asymmetry structures every AI interaction.
Tactical freedom is real but conditioned. The builder cannot redesign the model but can transform what it produces through the quality of her practice.
The place is vulnerable to the space's modifications. Model updates, policy changes, pricing adjustments—the strategist can alter the territory in ways that disrupt the tactician's habitual practice.
Portable practice survives territorial change. The practitioner who has developed deep judgment, evaluative skill, and rhetorical sensitivity carries her practice across platforms—recreating place in new spaces when the old space shifts.