Aaron Renn was in a good mood. And that was fair: It’s not every day that you get labeled the No. 1 “intellectual super influencer” for a major swath of the Trump-era right.

“It’s always good to have some independent validation of your work,” he told me.

A former partner at the consulting firm Accenture, he’s now best known for his writing on urban policy and the role of evangelical Christians (like himself) in American culture. His concept of the “negative world” — the idea that contemporary mainstream culture is inherently hostile to anyone taking evangelical principles seriously — has become influential enough to receive feature treatment in the New York Times.

Yet for anyone familiar with American politics, the idea that someone like Aaron Renn is in any way the No. 1 “super influencer” on the right might seem implausible. He’s not a social media warrior with the White House’s ear, like Laura Loomer or Chris Rufo. He’s not a household name like Tucker Carlson. He doesn’t run a big media outfit like Ben Shapiro. So where does Renn’s achievement come from, and what does it mean?

The source is a new report from the boutique risk analysis firm Baron Public Affairs LLC. Baron makes its money, in part, by advising corporate clients on how best to navigate the DC political environment to advance their interests. Its new report is an attempt to guide them through a specific subset of the right: the national-populist corner of the right-wing policy world that’s achieved greater prominence since 2016.

Baron’s report paints a fascinating picture of today’s conservatism, shining a light on some of its most thoughtful, relevant, and interesting quarters. Yet in doing so, the report also skates over divisions inside the group under consideration  — splits that matter immensely for the American right’s future.

The “super influencers,” explained

In its report, Baron compiled papers published by six right-wing think tanks and one right-leaning intellectual journal. They then used a proprietary research platform to comb through 29,181 citations to individual people in those papers, and assembled a list of the top 20 most cited names in their sample. These, in Baron’s estimation, are the “super influencers” who “most inform the policy leaders of the nationalist-populist movement,” the conservatives building intellectual scaffolding to support the GOP’s turn toward both economic and political nationalism. 

Baron did not publish the full list of 20 names (and did not respond to my repeated requests for comment). But alongside Renn, the most cited name in its sample, it revealed two other “super influencers” in an accompanying podcast: Brad Wilcox and Michael Lind. Both are revealing.

Wilcox is a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank known for taking an unusually empirical approach to social conservatism. If you’ve followed Wilcox, whose work has often been relevant to our coverage at Vox, you’ve probably seen him offering charts, graphs, and regression analyses to defend his view that marriage is one of society’s most important and valuable institutions. His most recent book is titled, simply enough, Get Married.

Lind, by contrast, arguably isn’t a conservative at all. A longtime commentator on American politics, he began his career as a kind of left labor populist — hostile to mass immigration due to the same (empirically doubtful) fears about the harmful effects on native-born workers that once shaped Bernie Sanders’s views on the issue. 

Long critical of the cultural elitism of American liberals, Lind has drifted more and more toward writing for conservative outlets: becoming in effect, if not in self-identification, a real influence on the populist right. (He is not the only liberal on the list, which per Baron includes “two Biden-era White House officials and a writer who leads one of the more prominent tribes of the Left.”)

These three men — Renn, Wilcox, and Lind — reflect what Baron sees as the defining preoccupations of the “super influencers” more broadly.

Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad (in fact, none of Baron’s top 20 were foreign policy experts at all). Instead, they’re overwhelmingly focused on different questions: how to reverse declining fertility rates, or the effect of trade competition with China on American cities and families. 

Unlike previous generations of conservatives, the right’s new intellectuals aren’t especially interested in maximizing economic growth or projecting American power abroad.

In our conversation, Renn suggested a uniting concept for the issues these writers cared about: “the social health of the nation.” By this, he meant things that couldn’t be fully captured by traditional economic metrics: whether Americans feel happy, whether they feel like they live meaningful lives, whether they feel like their families and communities are secure and stable. 

“There are these trends that don’t seem super healthy even if the GDP line continues to go up,” Renn says. “Those have been issues that weren’t part of Donald Trump’s initial set of issues, but are ones that have become widely talked about — even on the left.”

Though the preoccupations of the right’s new social thinkers may have arisen alongside Trump to challenge Reagan-era free-market conservatives, they themselves are not necessarily Trumpy. Befitting the fact that many have backgrounds in quantitative social science, and that some see themselves as liberals, they tend to be looking for answers beyond MAGA demagoguery. That’s true even though their research topics have some obvious appeal within MAGA spaces.

Super influencers against themselves

Baron’s report paints an appealing portrait of the modern right. Renn’s oeuvre is indeed fascinating, and Wilcox’s empiricism fosters a more serious conversation around social policy than the traditional culture war hysterics. More broadly, I think Baron is right that the sorts of issues that preoccupy these thinkers will indeed remain important for the right for quite some time.

But I think there’s a danger in treating this group as homogenous, or as representative of the right as a whole.

To see why, it’s helpful to go back to the report’s basic methodology — tracking citations in right-wing publications. Those publications were drawn from the following seven sources:

• American Affairs
• American Compass
• The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI)
• The Claremont Institute
• The America First Policy Institute (AFPI)
• The Center for Renewing America (CRA)
• The Heritage Foundation

These are extremely different outfits. Three of them — American Affairs, American Compass, and FAI — indeed overlap with the kinds of questions that Baron’s “super influencers” are interested in. The other four, by contrast, are MAGA more than anything else: Their mission, at least as currently constituted, is to mount an intellectual defense of the president’s worldview and/or develop policy ideas that might flesh out Trump’s inchoate impulses.

This isn’t necessarily relevant for Baron’s mission in advising clients on which influential voices deserve their attention. But for those of us interested in mapping the intellectual right, these distinctions are vital.

Indeed, by Baron’s own estimation, there is a significant difference between the kinds of people cited in reports by these two sub-groupings in its sample. The first grouping, Baron found, will regularly cite “heterodox liberals” like Lind who share some of their priorities; the second did not cite a single such liberal in any of the reports it surveyed. 

Thus, there actually isn’t one unified cadre of intellectual “super influencers” shaping the national-populist right. There are two distinctive groupings: one which influences the sorts of New Right outfits committed to their own ideological project, the other which influences reports released by MAGA appendages. While there is some overlap between those two groups, Baron’s own analysis suggests they are meaningfully distinct blocs.

This matters for the right’s future. In fact, it matters a lot.

Publications from the first three of Baron’s sources tend to be less hard-edged about partisan conflict; they engage with liberals quite a bit because they prioritize their long-term policy goals and are looking for coalition members who can help advance them. In their work, you can see some of the virtues the Baron report documents amongst the cited “super influencers” — empiricism, “genteel temperament,” a focus on distinctively 21st century social problems.

Work by the other four, by contrast, tends to paint American political divisions in apocalyptic terms. Claremont writers, for example, have famously described the 2016 election as “Flight 93” and declared that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They do not cite liberals approvingly because they see them as worse than political rivals: as villains, the authors of America’s ills, whose power must be crushed for the country to survive. 

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” as Heritage president Kevin Roberts put it in an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

One of the principal questions of the right’s looming post-Trump era will be whether it can move past this kind of zero-sum partisanship. The Baron report might lead one to be optimistic on that front: if Aaron Renn truly is the leading influence among the American right’s national-populist intellectuals, that portends a future where America’s warring political tribes can finally start to find common ground.

But I wouldn’t bet on it, at least not for some time now.

There are deep reasons why Trump, a human embodiment of rage and division, leads the Republican Party — and why some of the right’s top thought leaders are so loyal to him. So long as those reasons persist, the influence of more thoughtful “super influencers” on practical politics may be more limited than one might hope.

If you live in America in 2026, and you’re not so wealthy as to be absolutely shielded from daily life, you’re probably aware that everything is really expensive now. Gas and milk are both above $4 a gallon. Fresh vegetables are up almost 10 percent over this time last year, even though they will maybe give you explosive diarrhea. The median home in this country now costs almost half a million dollars. 

A lot of people — even those with relatively high-paying jobs — are very, very stressed about money.

In some ways, our current unaffordable era is starting to evoke the years right after the Great Recession. Unemployment was high, the economy was bleak, and a lot of Americans, myself included, were searching for ways to do more with less. 

One distinctive product of these harsh conditions was an entire blogosphere that emerged to give readers chatty, relatable advice on saving money. 

It was a kind of the golden age for personal writing on the internet, and these writers melded advice and personal narrative in a way that foreshadowed today’s influencers, but with a more lo-fi, DIY aesthetic. Starting in about 2008 and continuing for the next decade, these authors reached thousands of readers a day with tips on how to spend less and sock more away. There was Mr. Money Mustache, a brash “financial magician” who had retired at age 30 and believed ordinary people could save half or even 75 percent of their income. There was Trent Hamm of the Simple Dollar, an Iowa dad who shared his story of getting out of debt alongside recipes for cheap meals and homemade laundry detergent. There was my niche favorite, An English Major’s Money, by a young woman who shared my less-than-lucrative career path but who was nonetheless determined to achieve financial stability.

It wasn’t just old-school personal finance advice, it was a whole philosophical universe dedicated to the idea that by living on less, you could liberate yourself from the uncertainties of the economy and experience true freedom.

Collectively, I like to think of these writers as the frugalsphere.

Today, most of them are no longer blogging about saving money — some have gotten jobs in traditional media, while others have gone on to other careers entirely (or are simply enjoying early retirement). But their movement feels newly relevant today, as Americans struggle to afford necessities and face mounting anxiety over their economic future. So I decided to track down a bunch of frugality writers from that time, and see what they had to say about 2026.

One thing I wanted to know was why I wasn’t seeing the same outpouring of money-saving advice I’d seen in the wake of the 2008 crash. But I was also curious for bigger insights: What, if anything, is the equivalent of the frugalsphere in today’s inflationary era? And could the ethos of those optimistic coupon-clippers give us smarter ways to think about the unsettling new place we find ourselves in 2026?

What I found is that the frugalsphere still has lessons to teach us, but they’re not about reheating leftovers or washing out Ziploc bags. Instead, they’re about how to claim a sense of autonomy, even when our lives are buffeted by forces beyond our control.

The short, influential arc of the frugalsphere

The idea that you can achieve prosperity by carefully watching your spending is far from revolutionary, and self-help authors were extolling the virtues of frugality long before the Web 2.0 era. In the 1990s, for example, editor Amy Dacyczyn published a print newsletter called the Tightwad Gazette, teaching readers frugal tricks (Dacyczyn herself favored reusing aluminum foil) for the low price of $12 per year. 

But amid the upheaval of the Great Recession, when more than 15 million Americans found themselves unemployed in the worst crisis since the 1930s, a new generation of bloggers started offering advice about saving money, often directed at millennials starting their careers in a decimated job market.

“People were looking for something they could do,” Nicole Dieker Finley told me recently.

What Finley did was to start posting all her earnings and expenses on Tumblr around 2012, when she was trying to make it as an independent musician in Los Angeles. She soon caught the attention of the editors of The Billfold, a website launched the same year to cover money with a personal, relatable tone befitting the times. Billfold editors Logan Sachon and Mike Dang shared their student loan and credit card debt; Finley tracked her net worth and spending and wrote about her quest for financial independence. She later went on to a freelance career writing about money (including for Vox).

Kara Stevens, meanwhile, started the website the Frugal Feminista around 2012 while facing down student loans, credit card debt, and a tanking credit score: “It clicked to me that if I didn’t do something about it, I would be in this position of not being able to move forward in my life,” she told me.

Based in New York City, she shared tips for finding free events, cheaper dupes of popular brands, and deals on fancy hotels. “It was like, how am I living my Sex and the City life on a budget?” Stevens recalled.

As time went on, more bloggers joined the space, some of them already starting from a position of financial freedom. Kristy Shen and her husband Bryce Leung started the site Millennial Revolution after retiring in 2015 at age 31 with a seven-figure investment portfolio. 

“After 2008, people started freaking out and thinking that no job is safe,” Shen told me. “I think that’s when people started being more interested in finance.”

The message of the frugalsphere was that if you could leave cheaply enough and save enough money, you could weather any layoff — and eventually, not have to work at all. The bloggers of the era — many of them millennials aiming their advice at other millennials — tended to share a can-do attitude, a sense that with the right mix of care and planning, almost anyone could improve their financial situation.

Also, they wanted to stick it to the man

The frugalsphere also had a tinge of rebellion about it. “Americans tend to have a very up-down relationship with consumption,” said Helaine Olen, a longtime financial journalist and the managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank. After 2008, the pendulum started swinging against buying stuff, and the frugality bloggers were leading the swing.

Their implicit message was often that by refusing to buy expensive things, you were pushing back against corporations that wanted to control you. Frugality was, at least to some degree, about sticking it to the man.

At their peak, some personal finance blogs were reaching thousands of readers a day and breaking through into mainstream media. Shen told me that Millennial Revolution got 15,000 page views the day after a post about the virtues of renting a home was picked up by the CBC. Shen and Leung, as well as Trent Hamm and other bloggers, got book deals and started to reach a broader audience.

But the culture soon began to shift. The written personal blog began to die out, replaced by more visually driven social media – and an influencer ethos that rewarded the acquisition of new possessions, rather than showcasing ways to do without. Today, social media is much more about celebrating consumption than questioning it. 

On TikTok and Instagram, “it becomes about showing perfection and showing a good life,” Olen said. “And part of a good life, as we define it in the United States, is spending money.”

How frugality lost its shine

Today, some frugality influencers have found a home on TikTok, and the deinfluencing trend of a few years ago shows there’s still an appetite for anti-capitalism, even in the age of short-form video. But overall, the cultural and economic winds have blown against frugality, frugalsphere writers and observers told me. 

As inflation rose in the 2020s, necessities cost more, but saving also became less attractive. More people made the calculation that “if I don’t take this trip this month, it’ll be more expensive next year,” Olen said.

Upheavals like the Covid pandemic gave some Americans “a grim outlook on money,” Stevens said. Their feeling was, “there’s no chance that any of us can be wealthy. What’s the point of saving anything?”

Today, tips like making all your coffee at home instead of going out for a little treat don’t resonate the way they once did. This time is fundamentally different from 2008: The economy is nominally “good” now, and unemployment is low, but everything from eggs to real estate feels more unaffordable than ever. 

“People say, The cost of living is so high, I need some joy,” Stevens said. “Like, You can’t deny me everything.”

What the frugalsphere can teach us now

When I talked to frugalsphere writers about today’s situation, I ended up realizing that even if some of their specific tips are no longer as applicable, their mindset still is.

At its best, frugality advice was always about adapting to your situation, whatever that might be. When rice is cheap, buy in bulk. When basil is expensive, use the leftover pesto you froze in an ice-cube tray. Nothing is cheap right now — and, to be honest, I have never had the energy to freeze pesto — but the basic idea stands.

“Frugality to me means intentionality.”

Kara Stevens

“Be flexible,” Shen says. Millennial Americans once worried about their jobs being outsourced. Now workers all over the world are worried about getting replaced by AI. No matter what, though, “you have to change with the times.”

For Gen Z, that might look like entrepreneurship and investing rather than a traditional career and saving for a home, Shen said. I can’t yet imagine what it will look like for Gen Alpha, but there’s something reassuring about the idea that flexibility is a skill we can learn, one that can help carry us through even the most macro of macroeconomic shocks. 

One big thing that’s changed since 2008 is the politics of personal finance. In the 2010s and 2020s, many critics of the frugality approach began to point out that without systemic change to lower the costs of housing, health care, and education, all the coupons in the world weren’t going to make much difference. Today, affordability isn’t just an individual concern — it’s the cornerstone of a lot of political debates.

But even as we look to systemic solutions, there’s another big lesson Americans today can take from the frugalsphere: Control what you can.

For Stevens, that looks like acknowledging that “within any system that has a bias toward corporations or the wealthy, we understand that things may not be fair,” she said. “That also doesn’t mean that you don’t have personal agency.”

Exercising that agency might mean being more mindful around retail therapy rather than cutting it out entirely, Stevens said: “If I know that I need these little quick boosts to make me feel good because work is stressing me out, can I carve out a part of my budget that allows me to do that without completely disrupting my financial goals?”

Stevens, for instance, cares a lot about her skin, so she spends money on skincare products that really work for her, and cuts back on things like purses that don’t matter as much.

“Frugality to me means intentionality,” Stevens told me. It’s about “living more aligned with your values.”

In today’s era of polycrisis, it feels downright insensitive to promulgate the idea that anyone can get rich with the right combination of tips and tricks. But most Americans make at least a few choices every week about where our money is going.

If we can make whatever choices we do have in a way that’s intentional, in line with our larger goals for ourselves and the world — maybe that’s a 2026 version of financial independence.

Young American men are in trouble. They are the loneliest demographic in the Western world. Their social circles are shrinking. At all ages, they are significantly more likely to die by suicide than their female peers.

But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.

Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades. 

Most visibly in the US, a large community of gamers rallied together in 2014 to harass prominent female game developers and gaming journalists. They forced multiple women into hiding while claiming that they were fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. The campaign, which became known as Gamergate, made so much noise that it attracted the attention of Steve Bannon, who organized supportive coverage on Breitbart and treated it as a recruiting ground for the racist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic alt-right movement. As Osborn documents in Power Play, the communities that sprang up to organize Gamergate became pipelines to the communities that organized the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play. 

Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.

I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?

In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.

Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”

The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them. 

What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it. 

In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?

The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.

It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.

Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.

Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?

It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically. 

Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.

I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.

A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?

I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them. 

The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.” 

When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”

How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?

One of the best examples was in 2022, when Epic Games did fundraisers for the Red Cross through things like Fortnite. Their game store raised more money for the charity and its work in places like Ukraine than were donated to it by the countries of France or Italy.

You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities. 

That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.

I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?

Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds. 

This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society. 

The loss of investment in third spaces, especially for teens, is definitely something we’re seeing in the US as well.

You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?

I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association. 

Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work. 

So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”

Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games. 

It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent. 

Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign. 

It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.