NP The Internet Troll As The Trickster Archetype

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         He has the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, 
         a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself. 
         He loves chaos; his bag is full of golden apples he 
         can lob to set the masses squabbling. He has also 
         many masks, smoke bombs, straw men, cloaks, 
         puppets, matches, ethanol, knives, dust, sand, and 
         magicks of the most arcane sort. He knows what he 
         is about - causing trouble. Why? This is the troll’s 
         darkest mystery - if any one knew his secret, he 
         would die. For all trolls, their motive power is this: 
         without contraries, they cannot progress.

http://www.drewspeak.com/?p=53

This reminds me of the Scurvhamites in The Crying of Lot 49:

         Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of 
         Charles 1, a sect of most pure Puritans. Their hangup 
         had to do with predestination. There were two kinds. 
         Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, 
         Creation was a vast, intricate machine. But one part of 
         it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its 
         prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, 
         something blind, souless; a brute automatism that led 
         to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the 
         Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But 
         somehow those few saved Scurvhamites found 
         themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the 
         doomed with a certain sick and facinated horror, and 
         this was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous 
         prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there 
         was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, 
         who, like a ship's master, had been the last to go.
         COL49, 128

Running off of contraries just to start the flames, like Beck in 
"Satan Gave Me a Taco":

         "Opened up a Taco Stand, just to smell the smell. . . ."

There is that Robin Goodfellow thang (I know this guy, I really do),
though, speaking as one who is deeply attached to that archetype 
by accident of birth, very often the flames are created not by a desire 
to invoke chaos, but by the simple desire to express an opinion that 
feels natural to myself but turns out to be altogether unwholesome 
to everyone else. It may appear that I'm running off of some brute, 
inately contrarian, blind and souless force that assures me a front 
row seat in hell. But in fact, it's only a set of family traditions, carried 
along past rememberance, directing us to realms outside of 
present day consensus reality, all points of reference for our family 
history.