Martin Hughes is co-owner and Publishing Director at Melbourne-based independent publisher Affirm Press. Martin has previously worked as editor of The Big Issue magazine, as a writer, editor and photographer with Lonely Planet Publications, and in journalism and public relations in Ireland and Britain.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I’ve always been around journalism and publishing.

When I left as editor of The Big Issue magazine, I had an idea for a book combining my experiences, passions, and lack of pragmatism: a DIY job called The Slow Guide to Melbourne, which I wrote, publicised, and sold myself. That book went so well that another publisher proposed co-publishing a Slow Guides series. The series didn’t go so well, but by then I had set up the infrastructure of a publishing company. I worked on this part-time for several years, with some great people, but we didn’t really know what we were doing. In 2013, I teamed up with Keiran Rogers, who knew what he was doing.

American/Australian poet, David Mason, is also a verse novelist, librettist, and essayist. His latest collection of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?, is clearly the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see it. He is not afraid to declare in his introduction that ‘[s]ome literary works are better than others’. It is the works themselves, rather than the author’s origins or identity, with which he is concerned. In the first half of Incarnation and Metamorphosis, Mason concentrates on the issues that the phrase ‘better than others’ implies. The second half is devoted mainly to a number of writers whose work currently risks being undervalued or misunderstood to their disadvantage.

A good example of the latter actually appears in the first half of the book in the essay, ‘Beloved Immoralist’, on the novelist Joyce Cary (1888–1957), who is much less well known now than he once was. Mason reintroduces us to Cary by way of his late father, Jim Mason, an Iwo Jima veteran, who, though not particularly literary, was devoted to Gulley Jimson, the memorable hero of Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth.

‘Beloved Immoralist’ is the sort of criticism that Mason does very well, managing somehow to run the lives of his own father, and those of Joyce Cary and Gulley Jimson, together in ways that illuminate all three. While not the sort of article that would appear in a scholarly journal, it is a powerful reminder of the role certain key books can play in our lives. A nice evocation of this is Mason’s description of his father’s original copy: ‘One of the few possessions I retain of my life in America is my father’s copy of The Horse’s Mouth. Published in paperback in 1957 by Grosset’s Universal Library, it cost $1.45.’ This kind of particularity is a feature of Mason’s own writing as well of that of the authors he admires throughout the book.

Reading a book about online polarisation is a bit like reading a murder mystery novel where the murderer is revealed on page one. We all know it was social media, on our devices, with the trolls, in the bedroom. What we don’t know is the human cost of our newly fragmented online world: the lives destroyed, the families torn apart, the friends permanently estranged when someone falls down an online rabbit hole.

It is easy to demonise those who fall victim to online trolling, conspiracies or fringe YouTube recommendations. What’s harder is to understand why it happened to them and how to prevent it happening again. In Disconnect: Why we get pushed to extremes online and how to stop it, Jordan Guiao reveals this more personal side of the story. ‘They are members of our community,’ Guiao writes. ‘[They are our] mothers, fathers, grandparents, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, cousins’ – not just statistics in a government report. They are real people, he insists, whose lives have been upended by the online world and who now risk becoming conspiracy theorists or narcissists, sometimes losing touch with reality.

Guiao brings the perspective of a researcher to the book, with a touch of humility and empathy to boot. His work at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology shines through in every chapter. What surprised me was the writing style. This is a book that is hard to put down, which is surprising, given how much we all already know about the topic from the evening news.

Take his story of Diana, a QAnon believer, and her concerned friend, Stacey: ‘As Stacey got to know Diana, one thing stood out to her as a little odd – Diana loved to share conspiracy theories that she found online.’ Over time, Diana began to share more extreme stories. ‘This pattern of progression is characteristic for many QAnon victims,’ Guiao writes. ‘They begin sharing a little with close friends and family, and gradually this escalates in frequency and bizarreness.’ Stacey kept Diana in her life, but Guiao shares other stories where people have had to cut friends and family out of their lives, unable to handle the outlandish rants, the conspiracy ‘facts’ and the ‘evidence’.

Tracking this pain through recent events, the Covid lockdowns, and the US elections can make this book a confronting read. Guiao speaks to Kylie, who lost her job and became homeless during Covid. The only place she found solace was in an online, anti-lockdown group. Kylie jumped at the opportunity to join the convoy to Canberra, an echo of the Canadian ‘freedom truck’ movement. ‘I literally just packed up the car, took my dog, and just went,’ she says. It is when we are at our most vulnerable, Guiao suggests, a time when we need access to social services, a kind word, or a friend, that we become most vulnerable to online extremism.

Far from bringing us closer together, the internet seems to rely increasingly on our personal insecurities, fears, and weaknesses. What’s more, the messaging from extremists is increasingly tailor-made for a local audience. Conspiracy has turned into its own brand of local news, while real local stations are going out of business. Guiao observes how ‘Hollywood sex-trafficking tunnels morphed into storm-drain sex-trafficking tunnels beneath Melbourne; the list of those detained in the military prison Guantanamo Bay grew to include Victorian premier Dan Andrews, who became a target after strict lockdown rules [and] Australian 8chan users claimed a Sydney couple had been cured of Covid-19 after injecting disinfectant.’

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote: ‘The medium is the message.’ So too on social media, where the combination of disembodied anonymised voices, filter bubbles, rage cycles, and information overload creates the perfect breeding ground for systematically targeting our tired, stressed-out minds for recruitment into bizarre fringe extreme groups.

Nonetheless, Guiao sees hope in regulation, especially in the European Union. With privacy laws and an AI Act on the way, there is a tangible sense that the EU is leading here. Other solutions include making tech products ethical by design. He also proposes killing the hero worship of big tech creators and judging them in the light of day. Finally, he suggests that we need to temper our discussion of technology to ‘reflect and reassess’. This will work only if coupled with speedy regulation.

While it is all well and good to point out the dangers of big tech overseas, Guiao fails to grapple with how far behind the rest of the world Australia really is. Guiao cites great Australian research but fails to mention how many of our think tanks take money directly from Microsoft and Google, companies that fail to pay their fair share of taxes. He likewise fails to mention our unique status as one of the few Western countries without comprehensive privacy laws; one of the many reasons why Tinder, Facebook and other tech giants openly admit to ‘testing first’ in Australia before rolling out their updates overseas.

Grappling with the nature of big tech in Australia requires a much more critical look at our institutions, universities, and government than Guiao proposes. As it stands, he lays out the battleground where such a fight should take place. By showing us personal stories of big tech overreach, Guiao proves that the conspiracy theorists we hear about on the evening news are really just our neighbours, and that it is time for us to mobilise to protect citizens. Our future as a cohesive society depends on us preventing further polarisation. To put it bluntly, we must gain control of the tech platforms, before they gain control of us. 

In the poem ‘September 1913’, W.B. Yeats lamented the mean condition of his nation. It was not what the heroes had fought and died for – nor, in an idiosyncratically Yeatsian turn of logic, what they fled the country for. ‘Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide?’

Sean Connolly adopts the phrase for his account of two and a half centuries of emigration from Ireland. He is also charmingly perverse; his book emphasises that very few tides have actually been involved. Only those to the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and, far less strongly, to Argentina.

Four-fifths of all emigrants went to the United States, and Connolly naturally devotes most of his attention to that country. Not merely, however, because of the numbers: the Irish took longer to be accepted and integrated there than in other destinations. The Irish were among the first national groups to arrive in massed numbers into a settled settler society based largely on mainland British stock. During and after the Great Famine of 1846–49, a million Irish sailed for the United States, most of them poor and unskilled. A generation later, many were no more affluent or skilled. Although they came largely from a rural background, few joined the push to open up the West; they lacked the means to finance the journey or take up land. Instead they stayed in cities, above all New York and Chicago. Connolly doesn’t say so, but it is hard to avoid feeling that the early generations of emigrants, especially the Famine victims, were in a prolonged state of shock. Furthermore, there was substantial hostility to them from nativist Americans. They lacked the support that later generations enjoyed from the Catholic church – the Devotional Revolution in Ireland didn’t occur until the second half of the nineteenth century. The lives of priests and parishioners were not nearly as entwined as they became after Cardinal Cullen’s reforms.