Trickster Technology and the Case for Cunning
How chaos became a creative strategy, and why the internet is the new Trickster pantheon
Every age gets the Trickster it deserves. This one gave them Wi-Fi.
They’ve been busy. Seventeen tabs open, three burner accounts, answering emails with memes. The god of crossroads got rebranded to the god of cross-posting, which is essentially the same job, now with notifications.
This essay is my personal guide to the species, part myth, some media theory, and the occasional confession. Most of it true, then again, trust nothing, especially this sentence.
The God of Disruption
Pick a pantheon, find a Trickster. Hermes was stealing Apollo’s cattle before breakfast, then talking his way out of punishment by inventing the lyre and gifting it back. The clever part was the choreography that turned the victim into the audience, not the actual theft. Eshu, in the Yoruba tales, blocks every road just to prove a point about what you thought you wanted versus what you actually chose. Hanuman in the Ramakien leaps across oceans on a dare and comes back having torched the enemy’s capital city with his own tail, which seems excessive until you realise nobody asked him to do less.
The Trickster is not evil, despite what the missionaries claimed when they translated Eshu as the devil. It was, and always has been about information. Trick the system, expose the system, leave the system slightly better calibrated than you found it. Call it divine quality assurance, except the quality being assured is the integrity of the rules themselves, and the assurance is delivered in the form of public humiliation.
Animation understood all this before the academics did. Bugs Bunny was already shapeshifting through costumes, genders, and physics in the 1940s, slipping into a dress and a blonde wig to flirt his enemy into submission before anyone could call it subversive…which it wasn’t because the rabbit was operating by rules the culture hadn’t yet named. The first shitposter, and he didn’t even need Wi-Fi. Now that job has been outsourced to the algorithm, which serves you twelve perfect contradictions before Saturday brunch and waits to see which one you forward. Every glitch, meme, deepfake, and troll account descends from that carrot-chewing chaos, the one that asks: what happens if I press this button?
Catch them in the act, or don’t catch them at all. By the time the meme is in the museum, the disruption has already been domesticated, archived, and given a wall text that explains what made it dangerous in the past tense. The trick is telling sacred chaos from corporate cosplay before the difference stops mattering. Miss it, and the Trickster’s last laugh is usually the one you didn’t realise was at your expense.
The Professional Prankster
Spend enough time online and Trickster syntax appears everywhere, tweets that contradict themselves, fashion brands mocking their own drops, videos stitched over sermons. A meme is folklore in fast-forward, moving at the speed of light, or whichever platform is hosting it that week. Hermes in JPEG form, carrying messages faster than the speed of light, and arriving with sarcasm pre-installed because humour has replaced hierarchy as the delivery system for truth. The trouble is, once every boundary can be bent, sincerity stops being readable. You can no longer tell where the joke ends or whether the joke was ever separate from the life it sits inside. Which is convenient for the people who never meant any of it, and exhausting for everyone else.
This is when the mood turns from light heart to tread lightly, because the archetype has split. It escaped myth and went corporate, and the corporate version pays better. This isn’t new, every court has its jester who figured out the king pays well, but the modern version performs it at a scale the old ones couldn’t dream of.
Elon Musk is, following last week’s landmark filings, on the verge of becoming the world’s first trillionaire on the back of the upcoming SpaceX IPO. Yet he also just lost a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI. He framed it as a principled defence of their original non-profit mission; the jury dismissed it as a late attempt to sabotage a competitor he couldn’t control. Translation: he used the legal system under the pretence of looking out for humanity, when he was actually just trying to cripple a direct competitor.
That is what happens when a Trickster stops testing the system and starts owning it. The disruption stops being a service, and chaos becomes the business model. Politicians rehearse their gaffes. Brand accounts tweet self-awareness like a credential, the modern emperor’s fool with a verified account, licensed to speak truth as long as it stays self-serving and entertaining. The Trickster once exposed systems, and now the systems put them in the strategy deck.
The dark side of this archetype is nihilism. When irony eats sincerity, we lose direction and disinformation is just trickery with a payroll. Deepfakes, conspiracy influencers, extremist satire... these are Tricksters possessed by empire, not liberated from it. Myth warned us long ago, Hermes could guide souls or steal them. Every joke can become a curse if belief outruns context, because the algorithm doesn’t know which job it’s been given.
Which is why street economies remain the honest case study. The Trickster is terrible at saving money but brilliant at generating attention, which is to say they turn scarcity into a spectacle. Bangkok street vendors yelling fake promotions. Tuk-tuk drivers selling ‘world-class tours’ for ‘a very good price’ before dropping you at the tailor’s for a suit you did not know you wanted. We live in the attention economy’s mythic era, value by misdirection, fame by friction. Brands now pay millions for what the Trickster once gave away for free. It is virality born from contradiction.
In southern Thailand, Nang Talung shadow puppets perform Buddhist Jataka tales, but the plot always pauses for the clowns (Ai Teng and Ai Nuat), characters who exist outside the story to mock everyone inside it. They interrupt a prince’s death scene to complain about rice prices, or ask the demon king if he’s tried taking a nap. The audience laughs, the tension breaks, and the story can continue. That is classic Trickster pedagogy, chaos timed for maximum mercy. Thai Buddhism understands that even enlightenment needs a smoke break. Trickster art is how culture rehearses revolution without bloodshed, all done with a wink the algorithm will never quite catch.
Shapeshifting as Strategy
Tricksters rarely stay in one form. They cross-dress, cross-code, cross every axis available quicker than you can eat a hot cross bun. Every drag king, drag queen, and burner account joins this lineage, once again proving that gender was always theatre with better costumes. Western culture is only now catching up with what myth knew millennia ago, which is that identity isn’t fixed… it’s performance art with stakes and Law Roach on speed dial.
The creative community owes them everything. Remix culture, satire, collage, drag, every form of expression built on cutting up what was and reassembling it into what could be. They, without a shadow of a doubt, also invented the DM.
Bowie in feather boas, sequins, and lightning bolts, married to a supermodel, making the costume the revolving door of gender identity, or maybe even species. Prince did the same in heels and ruffles, wearing a thong on stage and writing the most heterosexual catalogue in pop. Warhol mirrored consumerism until it imploded on itself. None of it would exist without the archetype’s willingness to look ridiculous on the way to looking right, long before anyone else knew how to comprehend it.
Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie running the Heated Rivalry press tour as if the press tour invented them. Two former waiters, one of them literally a former clown, playing rival hockey players whose on-screen personas the fans have decided are inverted in real life, so nobody can tell whether the actors are the characters or the characters were already the actors. Praised endlessly for being refreshingly un-media-trained, which is, of course, the new media training. The phenomenon descends in a straight line from Jennifer Lawrence tripping up the Oscars stairs in 2013 and turning a serious actor persona into a permanent goofy-best-friend personality that the public has rewarded her for ever since. Authenticity is the new media training, whether the authenticity is real or not.
The internet loved this immediately. It turned fluidity into interface design: customisable and softly glitching. Every profile a mask, every comment a spell, and authenticity stopped meaning real and started meaning unproduced. The new costume being no costume, which of course everyone could see you choosing. And so when performance becomes constant, rest becomes the new authenticity, the offline hobby, the romanticisation of ‘going dark’, and the carefully curated absence. The paradox is obvious though, you can’t really announce your disappearance without reappearing. You want to be seen, but not fully seen. Everyone is guilty and nobody escapes. Trickster energy seeps into your life every time you press post.
Nobody understood this trap earlier than Cindy Sherman. Decades before Instagram turned the curation of the self into a daily chore, she was already using herself as raw material to construct characters that felt hauntingly familiar yet entirely hollow. From her early black-and-white pastiches of mid-century cinema to her recent, digitally fractured faces that mimic the modern influencer, she exposes the ultimate Trickster truth, when you spend your whole life perfecting the mask, the original face underneath disappears completely.
Case for Cunning
The feminine Trickster has been understudied because patriarchy has always mistaken wit for witchcraft. The lineage is older than the punishment, and the punishment is older than the historians who skipped over it. Take Baubo. An old nursemaid in the Eleusinian Mysteries who encounters Demeter in the worst of her grief, refusing food, refusing comfort, the earth dying with her. Baubo lifts her skirt and exposes her vulva. Demeter laughs. She eats, she drinks, and the earth begins to recover.
The terracotta figurines from Third-Century BCE Priene show a body with no head, a face where the abdomen should be, the chin dissolving into the vulva. Nipples for eyes. Her speech and her sexuality were the same organ, and the gesture had a name: anasyrma, to lift one’s skirts, a sacred charm against death and despair. Then Christianity arrived and reclassified her as a demon, sacred clown to obscene woman in one theological pivot. Every feminine Trickster since has lived inside that arc.
Grace Jones turned herself into living sculpture and dared anyone to look away. Josephine Baker danced in a banana skirt until the colonisers paid to watch their own joke. And on our screens, there’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge breaking the fourth wall in Fleabag, and Villanelle in Killing Eve, couture-clad chaos switching accents and personas like card tricks at a crime scene.
These women rewrite ridicule into a different rhythm and they remind us that trickery can be tenderness in disguise. Call it cunning, the old word for women who knew too much, but this is a repeated pattern of trickery as a survival tactic, when truth alone gets you punished, or, not so long ago, burnt at the stake.
The Sacred Joke
Thai animism treats laughter as a cleansing ritual. Every ceremony has its comic interlude, a pause to acknowledge the absurdity of being human in the presence of the divine. The reverence is real, the rites are serious, but deep down we all know the gods enjoy jokes more than incense. Even funerals include communal breaks, gossip, shared meals, dogs barking and flip flops missing at the temple entrance, the living reminding death it doesn’t get the final word.
Humour, in this worldview, is continuity. It resets the collective nervous system, which is why memes appear right after tragedy, digital sanuk (Thai for fun), pleasure-wisdom keeping grief from stagnation. This is what the Trickster has always done. Their gift is renewal through disruption, and their role is to break rhythm so the song can keep evolving. Creation begins with curiosity, and when a Trickster is involved, sometimes with crime. They are the laughter in the data stream, the prank behind the prophecy, the artist inside the algorithm, refreshing pages, remixing myths, performing sincerity with a wink. A true Trickster isn’t trolling you, the are translating. They show us that chaos and care are not opposites but co-authors.
If the Crone was clarity, then the Trickster is her chaotic child, forever testing her patience. Together they complete the circuit - knowledge and noise, archive and improvisation, mother and meme. Without the Crone, the Trickster never learns. Without the Trickster, the Crone ossifies. Every institution worth keeping runs on both: museums need curators and boundary breakers, society needs reverence and roast.
But none of it works if you can’t read what’s in front of you. The cure to all of this is critical thinking and literacy. Censorship has its place, but it’s the dull edge of an old knife.
Recognising the Trickster’s hand, whether disguised as joke, judge, or genius, is the first act of freedom.
Related: Trickster Lore: Six Gods, Baubo, and The Dirty Joke That Saves Your Life
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