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Perhaps the most common, and least recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs. Ed Yong ‘An Immense World’

I think I will always remember Ed Yong as the voice who, along with Norman Swan, helped keep me informed in regards to COVID. I therefore was initially intrigued when I came upon An Immense World and found that it was in fact not about the pandemic.

At the heart of An Immense World is Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of ‘unwelt’. The unwelt is the unique, species-specific sensory bubble that every animal inhabits, the “slice of reality I can perceive.”[1]

Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.

Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong

Throughout, Yong explores the concept through chapters on surface vibrations, smells and tastes; light; color; pain; heat; contact and flow; sound; echoes; electric fields; and magnetic fields. However, Yong is also keen to highlight that the concept of unwelt is more complicated than any single sense.

An animal’s Umwelt is the product not just of its sense organs but of its entire nervous system acting in concert. If the sense organs acted alone, nothing would make sense. Throughout this book, we have explored the senses as separate parts. But to truly understand them, we need to think about them as part of a unified whole.

Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong

All in all, Yong’s writing balances between “scientific rigor and personal awe.” [2] Laura Miller captures it best, calling the book a “catalog of wonders.”

One of the things that really stood out for me while reading An Immense World was the limit to what we can actually know. Whether it be the constraints of science or appreciation of differences. This is something that Michel Faber touches upon in his exploration of animals and music in Listen.[3] However, one of the biggest challenges is anthropomorphism and actually forgetting about others.

Perhaps the most common, and least recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.

Source: An Immense World by Ed Yong

At its heart, An Immense World is about humility and serves as a corrective to the presumptions of human beings.

  1. Source: Ed Yong unlocks the secret world of animal senses – ABC listen ↩
  2. “In this book that follows on from 2018’s I Contain Multitudes, Yong writes in a perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world.” Source: ‘An Immense World’ dives deep into the umwelt of animals by Barbara J. King ↩
  3. “Cognitive neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel explains that when we humans listen to music, we predict where the next beat will be, and get pleasure either from our guesses being correct or from the rhythm teasingly wrong-footing us with unexpected syncopations. Apes just don’t get that.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
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Turn after turn they encouraged it. In China, they specifically built the software to order. In America, they put staff in with the Trump campaign to help them stage the war of misinformation, trolling, and lies that won him the election. And in Myanmar, they enabled posts that led to horrific sexual violence and genocide. A lethal carelessness. Sarah Wynn-Williams ‘Careless People’

Careless People spans Wynn-Willliams time at Facebook, beginning with her hire in 2011 as a ‘diplomat’ responsible for guiding the rules on data and content, until her sacking in 2017 on the back of accusations of misconduct leveled against Joel Kaplan. The book covers perspectives on a number of episodes, including the failure of internet.org, the role served by the platform in the promoting violence against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, the push to get into China even if that meant supporting state surveillance, the use of image-based data associated with teens to target them, and the role the platform served in helping bring Donald Trump to victory in 2016.

The world described felt like it was somewhere between the absurdity of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the film Devil Wears Prada. Cartoon pictures to describe a cartoon world? Some of the particular stories recounted included Mark Zuckerberg’s proposal to provide internet for refugees, until someone realised that refugees do not have any money to pay, being invited to bed by Sheryl Sandberg, trying to concoct a meeting between Xi Jinping and Mark Zuckerberg, writing an email in the midst of giving birth, and being described as not responsive during maternity leave during which time Wynn-Williams’ had an amniotic embolism and was in a coma.

The further the book went on the more that it felt like Wynn-William possibly trying to get on the right side of history. Not everyone jets around with Sandburg and Zuckerberg, right? This is something that Tom MacWright touches on in his review:

Katie Harbath second-guesses Wynn-Williams’s reports of sexual harassment and expects Sarah to acknowledge “the incredible contributions of her peers” in her work – like the take-home lesson of this book is that Wynn-Williams is so great at her job, not that it’s an account of the evil at the top. Another former Facebook employee, Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, wrote that Wynn-Williams was complicit, which is something the author never denies.

Source: Careless People by Tom MacWright

I am not exactly sure what I expected from Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir of her time as director of global public policy at Facebook. Like Cory Doctorow, I think I was drawn to it by the fact that they tried to have it banned.

I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta’s lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:

So I’ve got something to thank Meta’s lawyers for, because it’s a great book!

Source: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’ (23 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Meta claimed that the book is ‘false and defamatory’:

The ruling says that Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication. It did not order any action by the publisher.

A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, said in a post on Threads: “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published”.

Source: Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee by Guardian

I could not help see the irony of this with Wynn-Williams’ account about Sheryl Sandberg and her belief in people saying things because you want them to be true:

Sheryl, who advocates for women in the workplace day after day, in bestselling books, TED talks, and panels around the world? I remember her once writing in a message,

I always believe that when companies and people have to say things over and over it is because they want them to be true but they are not. When I was at McKinsey, they always said they were “non-hierarchical” because they were so hierarchical. Google is “not political.” One of our favorite candidates who almost joined us was “highly ethical.”

Source: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

All in all, Careless People is a sadly humorous book that pulled back the curtain on the façade.

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

Source: A Facebook Insider’s Exposé Alleges Bad Behavior at the Top by Jennifer Szalai

It would have been more enjoyable if it were not so serious.

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Guilt is appropriate for one part of our legacy, though, What we should feel guilt for may not be the stealing itself, but the fact that we keep on refusing to address what the stealing has done. We've resisted listening to First Nations people. We go on rejecting ideas that they tell us will offer a way forward. We might tell ourselves that we don't need to feel guilt for the past. But we have to accept that we're guilty for what we're doing -- or failing to do - in the present Kate Grenville ‘Unsettled’

With Unsettled, Kate Grenville traces her family history, while also reflecting on her own experience of growing up and understanding the land. She goes on a pilgrimage, beginning at Wiseman’s Ferry and following the footsteps of her forbears as they progressively moved north across several generations to Guyra in the New England region. The book explores the language we use, the place of landscape, the wider history of colonial settlement, and those silent aspects that haunt us.

Throughout Grenville’s journey, there is a continued effort to grapple with the language used and what it can tell us. Wiseman “took up the land”, rather than took the land from the indigenous people, digging up the yam daisies and planting corn. Mogo Creek means “stone axe”, however the fact that the stones used were brought in and traded left silent. As children, it was common to play ‘Cowboys and Indians’, but not settlers and aborigines? Is the use of indigenous names for places an example of appropriation or acknowledgement? Or is it about authenticating ourselves with the original owners?

Extending upon the use of language, Grenville explores the landscape that she travels through on her journey. She talks about the way in which you hear things when you stop. How the landscape was how it was because indigenous people made it that way. For the indigenous, landscape is an embodiment of who a person is, representing a different kind of love.

Unsettled serves as much as a general history of Colonial Australia, with Grenville discussing the notion of crown land, squatters and selectors, segregated reserves, terra nullius, and the lack of a treaty.

Here in Australia, we don’t have anything that can serve us as that common starting point. No treaty was ever made. There was no acknowledgement of First Nations. There was no negotiating. All that’s ever been offered is charity, to be given or withheld as non-indigenous Australians see fit. Which is why centuries after the British landed, we’re still trying to work out how to be here.

Source: Unsettled by Kate Grenville

Extending upon this discussion, Grenville reflects upon the failure of the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum. She argues that guilt is not about what was done in the past, but what we continue to do in the present.

Going beyond the history, Grenville suggests that sometimes what stands out is what is left unsaid, what is unrecorded, what is left off colonial memorials, or out of diaries and newspapers. Those things haunt. She gives the example of an account at Wiseman’s Ferry where some men rescued a cricket ball from a snake. Grenville suggests that this is highly improbable and more an example of propaganda. These stories instead serve as a tin-opener to the can of worms of the past. The particular question that haunts Grenville is whether anyone would actually write down and record a massacre of people belonging to the land? Although there were people with a moral crisis, they just allowed it to be bent.

In the end, Unsettled differs from Grenville’s fiction, such as The Secret River, which seek to go beyond the history to some bigger truth, because at their heart, a story is a lie. Although we might wonder about how our ancestors might have felt, there is a danger in imitating reality. There is also a danger of stumbling on someone else’s land through the naïve act of imagination. Instead, Unsettled seeks to suspend resolution, sit with history, with the question, to be ‘conscious of the air’, without necessarily settling on a particular truth.

It was interesting to think about Unsettled alongside Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, a book which explores the way the Australian landscape was not just found, but actively made through the words and actions of its colonisers. It was also intriguing to read this book alongside Helen Garner’s The Season and David Marr’s Killing for Country. Each book feels like a narratives that finds is way through writing.