Every time I see “RDJ” I think Richard D James and get a little excited. Even when I know full well that the article I’ve just read and the comments I am currently reading are to do with Robert Downey Jr.
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Ah, I was looking for that, thanks for posting it.
You can see where walking out would be the better play, compared to how Tarantino handled it.
Because responding to a person engaging you in conversation in bad faith – a troll – only encourages them, and gives them this footage to air, and the incentive to try it again to get a rise out of the next celebrity.
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Krishnan Guru-Murthy would have been at home giving interviews for The Daily Show which makes his pitiful declarations of being a ‘serious’ interviewer both painful and laughable.
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I just hope that this will be a nail in the coffin of airing these PR interviews on news programmes. I have sympathy for both RDJ and KGM and regardless of what you think of the interview style this just isn’t news, it’s marketing.
And that is the crux of it. It doesn’t matter how damn good an interviewer is. It doesn’t change marketing into news and it doesn’t excuse marketing on a news broadcast.
Could it have been a better interview if KGM had handled it more skillfully? Most certainly. But that wouldn’t have made the thing any more justified in taking up airtime better served on actual news.
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The thing though is, Richard D. James gives awful interviews pretty much on purpose. Rather than being blind-sided, he says contentious stuff and pisses people off preemptively.
Heh, I love Aphex, he’s my kind of mutant.
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Textbook troll, then.
Requires textbook troll response: walk away, flag for removal to avoid future victims.
Huh? No, Richard D. James isn’t really a troll. He’s a musician that hates bullshit interviews and telling people about himself, so he intentionally gives interviewers nothing to work with for shits and giggles.
If anything, he’s a culture-jammer, not really a troll.
I think that’s all in the past now though, if you’ve seen any of the more recent interviews (post Syro) he’s really opened up - between those interviews and the soundcloud dump and subsequent drunken ramblings and chats with soundcloud users, he really seems to have “come out of his shell” for want of a better expression.
Still amuses me when Warp records honchos talk about him with comments like “Richard thinks after doing one interview that’s all the promotion needed for an album”.
…and yeah, he’s very much the kind of happy mutant I aspire to be! 
The guy is an actor. Why would anyone care about an actors personal life is beyond me but it seems to be big business.
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Tarantino was super entertaining, however, and he got some press for it and it totally fit his personality anyway so I don’t really think it was a particularly negative event for him. Like, his response wasn’t a surprise or anything. I wonder if this interviewer realizes that.
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Having done a fair bit of analysis of both videos myself, I agree with the just-plain-bad-at-his-job observation. The Downey interview is extremely weak and tentative, he’s visibly afraid to ask that final question after it’s already going badly due to his crazy-ass questions.
He does, at the ~3:30 mark here. That’s the start of the weirdness.
What do you think of the obvious parallels being made between you and Iron Man?
But [Tony Stark] is becoming a much more likeable character? A better man? In a way that you are as well?
To Rob’s point he just does this in such an inept way that it all falls flat.
But the Tarantino interview – after the 4 minute mark (and the damn thing goes for 8 minutes) it’s Tarantino giving him way, way more airtime than he deserves by not-responding to his terrible questions in dramatic fashion. (Okay, it is Tarantino, but still.)
There’s zero value in the last few minutes of that interview due to all the hemming and hawing and general weirdness. It’s not a good, brainless cinema junket piece, it’s not incisive hard-hitting interview journalism, it’s … a car wreck for us to gawk at, uncomfortably.
If we compare these interviews:
- 7 minutes of “bad, but ended decisively”
- 8 minutes of “bad, and went on awkwardly for 4 full minutes in a way that satisfied neither audience, nor interviewer, nor interviewee”
The weirdness starts at around the 4 minute mark in both of them, and boy can you feel it coming. Like there’s a distinct point in both of his interview scripts where he says “Enough of this softball movie nonsense! Here’s where we ask the celebrity hardball questions!”
Unless this guy wakes up one day and stops being a trolley, with intent to deliberately provoke while ignoring anything about the movie because he clearly doesn’t care – walking away was the best outcome for everyone.
And yeah, Downey is right – he should have left sooner, after the “liberal” question.
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You and trolls. You spend so much time analyzing and crunching data about trolls you forget that there are actual humans involved. Not just the victim of trolls, but the trolls themselves - they are humans interacting with other humans. You can’t break everything down into numbers and suddenly have a solution. Real life is way more complicated than that.
And I note you find this silliness worthy of a response because you can yammer about analyzing human behavior, but my other comments in the hugo thread get ignored.
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I will agree with marilove in saying that I don’t think ‘troll’ is an especially insightful or robust designator of human behaviour. Some might even call it reductionist, or pat. It is a convenient shorthand for identifying undesirables but beyond that falls flat in its descriptive helpfulness. I worry, since you of all people tend to make important software architectural decisions based on data with tangible implications for us humble internet-mortals, that perhaps the model of human behaviour that arbitrates your data-mining, and informs your conclusions, is not as sophisticated as one might hope.
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I think it’s sophisticated enough.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/what-is-trolling/
If you can point out specifically where it isn’t, feel free by replying to that post in the comments there.
There is a continuum of behavior – but once you are reasonably certain someone is not participating in the conversation in good faith, the primary goal should be flagging and removing them and all their content, rather than responding and encouraging more of it.
(Example: new user comes in and repeats Common Talking Points for Controversial Topic X as their first post. That is a very strong indicator that you are about to engage with someone who is there in bad faith, with no intent to have a rational discussion, but endless trainwrecks of argument.)
These interview videos are the best illustration of classic trolling I’ve ever seen. Based on the earlier Tarantino interview alone, there is no way any celebrity should choose to interact with this guy.
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They are not always that obvious, though. The bad ones are, but the good ones can be much more subtle, especially at first. And they keep on coming. And they aren’t new. And they aren’t going away any time soon. They are roaches.
That’s my fucking point, dude. Are you even reading what I’m saying? You’re responding to everyone else but me, I notice, a person who has explicit experience in this and who is trying to explain to you her experience, but you just keep going on about data and continuum of behavior. I wonder if you’re actually reading what I am saying.
Like, you’re responding to a dude with one comment in this thread, but not the woman who has actual experience dealing with this shit and who has already left several well thought out comments and who has previously asked why you haven’t responded to my points directly. But you respond to him. RIGHT. Business as fucking usual.
If it was that easy, we wouldn’t be having this fucking discussion.
Like, what “Common Talking Points”? Where’s the list? Do you have a list? And what are we using to determine when someone is suddenly not arguing in good faith?
You have all of this data and yet you’re applying it to very vague ideas that you have yet to define.
I am still unsure why you’re some big authority on this shit.
You have data. Okay? And how are you actually compiling this data, and how are you coming to your final conclusions on how we should respond according to this data?
“I crunched some data, so therefore!” is not a good enough fucking reason for me.
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Well, not to dredge up old incidents, but there was this one time I replied a bit too much to you (though I swear, I only have the best of intentions, I didn’t think it was that much, I only I thought you raised two very interesting points that deserved their own two dedicated topics) and it became an … incident.
So to be honest, I avoid replying to you because I don’t want to cause any further problems.
(I made an exception for replying about the flagging with 
because I was very encouraged to see you flagging the trollies and I appreciated that a lot. I also wanted to be clear I don’t hold any grudges about the past, or anything like that. Because I never do.)
Anyway, my comments are mostly about the videos, the two 8 minute interviews. Have you seen this one? Same guy.
(He references the Tarantino interview, too)
Personally, I find that this guy is a trolley because he regularly produces interviews that tell me nothing about the book/movie/celebrity. And that’s the goal of these interviews.
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Yeah, you were really annoying for a minute there but that was some timeago. With that in mind, I do understand why you haven’t replied to me directly as much as I’d like in this conversation.
But I’m terrible at holding grudges especially after some time has passed, and honestly I sort of forgot about all that until like five minutes ago when I went ooooh, well, yeah. Hah. Oops.
You’ve been somewhat frustrating as usual 
but otherwise, you’ve totally pulled back and have been reasonable in your interactions with me, so thank you. We cool. Well, as cool as we are ever going to be.
That said, this guy is an idiot and a troll but he’s also interviewing stupidly rich people about things that are completely outside of normal life. Like, it’s not really the same thing as the really hateful, misogynistic crap I and other women deal with on a daily basis on the internet which also often bleeds into real life. It’s also not really the same as the trolls who are literally getting in groups and literally planning their daily troll schedules. This is what is happening.
This is totally off topic for this particular topic but I want you to realize that the sexist trolls you see here on BoingBoing? They aren’t really that unusual from normal non-troll people (mostly men but also women!) I and other women deal with in every day life. For reals, dude.
I honestly don’t think you get how fucking common this sort of hate is, as if all the trolling you see here are separate instances not related to anything else, and as if we can handle it on a “case by case” basis by merely spraying some troll-be-gone on each individual troll as they appear.
That little troll murph that I flagged? Yeah, that’s fucking mild, and that’s why I had a bit of fun with him. Murph was not a good troll. He was a bad troll. He was silly, really. Not to be taken very seriously, on an individual basis.
But I really, really don’t think you understand how much of this women face every.single.day.
Have you ever been negged? LIKE IN REAL LIFE? I have! Multiple times! And once it was SO blatant that I knew this guy was totally a PUA (pick up artist) and I am 100% positive he frequents reddit (it was hilarious but also like wtf? these people exist in real life!!!). (And please note I am as hard to “neg” as you might imagine lol.)
And as I’ve said before, I’ve been forced to resign from a job due to revenge porn. In 2007. Before it was even a thing.
This is not just random and merely “annoying” behavior that can be flagged, shrugged off, and then deleted.
These people (“trolls”) are cockroaches and I do not use that analogy lightly. I once lived in an apartment with a cockroach infestation worse than anything seen on Joe’s Apartment.
Do you know how difficult it is to get rid of cockroaches? And how IMPOSSIBLE it is to ignore their existence if you have an infestation?
You stomp on one … five take its place.
You need something much stronger than a delete button to get rid of these “trolls”.
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Huh? Where does he figure in the original post?
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Not sure how that happened thanks for pointing it out. Correction - Krishnan Guru-Murthy not Richard Ayoade
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I did [post a video above] (Why Downey walked off during that interview) of Krishnan Guru-Murthy “inteviewing” Richard Ayoade though. It is worth watching.
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