Abbie Chatfield, Clementine Ford, and the ugly truth in the middle of it all.

Some thoughts.

I had just started high school when we got our first computer at home. The bulky grey box had dial-up internet, so you had to make a conscious choice about whether you wanted to be on the telephone or online. Almost immediately, I became addicted to The Sims, a life simulation computer game where you built an avatar and designed a world for them – a house and a family and a job and a set of hobbies. It didn’t take players long to put their Sim in the swimming pool and delete the ladder, or to start a fire in your Sim’s kitchen and put a cabinet in front of the door. It was funny to see their arms flail above their heads, to see them wet themselves with fear. These weren’t real people, after all. They were just characters in a computer game.

Almost a quarter of a century later, computers now live in our pockets. We moved on from The Sims and instead of creating fictional avatars, social media platforms asked us to create avatars of ourselves. We choose how they look, what they share, who they’re friends with and what they like. We represent their personalities with curated posts about pop culture and politics, and we spend so much time with them that they feel like us. We birth these online beings and we control what they do, so what is the difference between who we are in real life and who we are on Instagram? Are they not one in the same?

This was what I was thinking about when I opened Instagram this week, and saw a young woman sobbing into her phone. Her emotional pain was visceral. This woman – TV host, podcaster and influencer Abbie Chatfield – was distressed by a series of attacks on her character by author and prominent feminist, Clementine Ford. Chatfield was prominent during the recent election campaign, interviewing both Labor leader Anthony Albanese and then Greens leader Adam Bandt on her podcast. Both women have been outspoken in criticising the conflict in Gaza, but Ford believes that Chatfield’s decision to host Albanese gave support to a leader who hadn’t done enough to prevent attacks on Palestinians. It’s hard to find everything Ford has said about Chatfield, because Instagram stories have a 24-hour expiry, but here are a few direct quotes:

“Abbie Chatfield is first and foremost all about Abbie Chatfield. What a f---ing fake.”

“No amount of fake crying to try to launder her complicity in doing PR for genocide supporters can change that.”

“She is completely shallow and frequently unable to actually prosecute an argument she hasn’t cobbled together from uncredited sound bites gleaned from other people.”

“This is why she fails time and time again to when challenged on her views — because she doesn’t actually know what she’s talking about half the time. She’s a smart self promoter and a deeply basic thinker.”

“And if you want to message me defending your weird parasocial obsession with a woman I can guarantee does not see you as her equal, please save your energy. I do not care if you think I’m a bad feminist for refusing to worship at the alter [sic] of an idiotic narcissist who cares first and foremost about herself and her own power.”

Chatfield had been receiving messages from her followers with screenshots of what Ford had posted about her. She’d been ignoring the insults for months, she said. But looking into her camera, she appeared to address Ford directly.

“Please stop dehumanising me.”

“Please, you can criticise my content, you can criticise my work, just – I’m begging you – stop lying about my intentions.”

“Stop saying that I have a personality disorder. You don’t know me. This is so f---ing triggering, I just want her to stop.”

Those four words – “you don’t know me.”

Clementine Ford and Abbie Chatfield seem to have met a handful of times. Chatfield had Ford as a guest on her podcast in 2020, and Ford had Chatfield as a guest on her podcast the same year. They’ve seen each other face-to-face, they’ve had real life conversations, but I’d hazard a guess they’ve spent more time consuming each other online. That most of what they “know” about each other is really what they know about their respective avatars – what their faces look like and what they write and what they say through a phone screen.

Ford does know the version of Chatfield who she believes is “a f---ing fake”. She knows a flattened, pixelated, two-dimensional representation of a person. Clearly, she very much dislikes the Abbie Chatfield who pops up on her Instagram and her TikTok. She believes that Abbie Chatfield is a “deeply basic thinker” and “an idiotic narcissist,” and believes those things with such conviction that she’s shared them with her 240,000 Instagram followers.

The problem, of course, is that Ford does not know Chatfield. Not in the sense that we know the people we spend our lives with, the people we disagree with, the people we share a meal with. Restaurants are not full of patrons standing up, pointing fingers and shouting “narcissist!” at each other, because that’s not how human beings behave. It’s very rare that we call each other names in person, that we accuse each other of being shallow or self-interested. It’s incredibly difficult to look someone in the eye and insult them, because usually our anger softens when we’re confronted by their humanness.

We tend to save our sharp-tongued jabs to be used behind each other’s backs. We tell stories and analyse the transgressions of the people around us, exploring our own morality by explaining why they’re wrong and why we’re right. We don’t do this publicly because none of it is really about the people, it’s about ideas.

Online, though, “people” are interchangeable with ideas. They’re one in the same. That’s what happens when you flatten an identity into something you can fit in the palm of your hand. It loses all its nuance. It can’t breathe.

Clementine Ford, I don’t think, was talking about Abbie Chatfield the human being. Perhaps she was talking about Abbie Chatfield the avatar, which, as we saw, is fundamentally attached to a person. A person who has watched her real name and her real face and her real voice be attacked, and feels it in her real flesh and blood. Ford, also, probably didn’t imagine she was speaking to Chatfield. She was speaking to her followers.

There’s a quote from The Social Network, the 2010 film about the genesis of Facebook, that I thought was absurd at the time, and now seems eerily profound. In the film, Justin Timberlake’s character, Sean Parker, says, “we lived in farms, and then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet”.

I’m not sure any of us anticipated the cost of living on the internet. That when we become an avatar, we’re no longer seen as a human. And there is nothing quite so painful as that.