Exploring R. A. Lafferty's Media Vision: The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers

“No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.”

The Unique Media Imagination of Lafferty

It would be a fun project to curate a chrestomathy of R. A. Lafferty’s thoughts on media, drawing intelligent connections to media studies. Why? Well, for two compelling reasons: Lafferty poured an immense amount of intellectual energy into crafting a new media imaginary, and let’s face it, there’s truly nothing like him. What he created has, so far, been a dead end, but it’s a fascinating one.

Some stories practically select themselves for inclusion. “The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers” is a must, alongside pieces like “Splinters,” “Thou Whited Wall,” and “Calamities of the Last Pauper.” Once you capture that category—the Lafferty media-broadcast story—along with relevant passages from his novels, especially Not to Mention Camels (1976) and The Elliptical Grave (1989), the scope of exploration expands dramatically. I’d certainly want to include the extraordinary sections on the Age of Silent Radio from The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (1977) and the early media-related insights from Serpent's Egg(1987). Soon, the choices become challenging because Lafferty’s media ideas are deeply intertwined with his thoughts on consensus and conspiracy. Once you include that, you’re looking at a significant slice of his work.

The Relevance of "The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers"

I suspect “The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers” resonates even more now than when it first appeared. We are all veterans of the new digital culture, navigating social media, algorithmic feeds, bots, influencer economies, cancel culture, and networked propaganda. These are all media products, sold by tracking companies behind our backs. If Lafferty goes astray in the story, it might be on the question of centralization. His story-world presents a single, unified global news network, a tightly integrated media apparatus speaking with one voice. Yet, as we know, the 21st century is characterized by media fragmentation. No single platform or institution can dominate the flow of information anymore.

However, I believe he is more right than wrong here. Today’s media may have a hundred “fingers”—platforms, influencers, micro-communities, and automated systems—but the owners of media can still coordinate when it truly matters. The illusion of decentralization masks economic coordination: the way oligarchs align with or intimidate state power, or how frontier AI firms present a united front against any legislation that might impose oversight or enforce safety constraints. The question of centralized media ownership versus decentralizing media channels is, of course, incredibly complex when it comes to signal control. That said, the stakes are uncomfortably close to where we find ourselves now.

Lafferty's Media Thinking and Its Influences

In most of Lafferty’s media thinking, there is significant overlap with the ideas of Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) and Edward Bernays (1891-1995), two of the earliest and most influential thinkers who framed mass communication as a tool of social control. Lafferty must have been aware of their work. Lasswell was a political scientist who studied World War I propaganda and concluded that modern societies required systematic management of opinion. This led to his famous media formula: who says what to whom through what channel with what effect. He believed mass media was essential for guiding public behavior. One must maintain a chokehold on social order.

Bernays, often dubbed the father of public relations, took a more strategic and cynical approach that makes him resemble a patron saint of Lafferty’s media lords. In Propaganda (1928), he argued that democratic societies require the deliberate “engineering of consent,” using media to shape desires, beliefs, and habits. Nowadays, he’s probably best known due to Noam Chomsky. “The Hand With One Hundred Fingers” is a narrative where figures like Lasswell and Bernays have triumphed. Lafferty writes that a "century-long battle over the nature of reality" has been lost.

In the world of the story, there exists a powerful union of Person-Projector firms known as The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers. This Hand dictates truth, manipulating the global electronic personality and rendering reality a mirage. Because reality has become this mirage, The Hand can instantly enhance or degrade citizens. All they need to do is project a consensus onto world television and onto individuals. This ensures there is no distinction between "seeming to have special attributes and actually possessing them." One area where Lafferty hits the nail on the head is that this all boils down to subscription services. Those who pay the fees to The Hand please the media lords; they gain access to success. Dissenters are biologically and socially rewritten into bestial beings whose presence becomes offensive to the senses.

The Creation of an Untouchable Class

This leads to the emergence of an untouchable class of individuals—people who, through acts of nonconformity or sheer bad luck, become scapegoated. Lafferty focuses on a handful of victims, including a married couple, Crispin and Sharon Babcock. They are targeted for refusing personality correction, and The Hand crushes them. They transition from being a loving couple to individuals who find each other physically repulsive. Then there’s Judge Roger Baluster, who refuses to pay maintenance fees on principle. The Hand projects the look of a buzzard over his once-eagle visage. Others, like Sylvester Sureman, are ruined by clerical errors, becoming Mr. Quagmire. The once-beautiful Conchita Montez is rendered disgusting.

The outcasts created by The Hand retreat to what Lafferty calls sly halls. These sanctuaries offer the excluded a modicum of culture and self-respect. But then, The Hand makes a breakthrough, breaching the sanctuary of the sly halls. The new tool of the Projection Lords? Smell. A killing stench is projected into the minds of the outcasts. The sly halls now appear to be places of stink-weed, slashing rats, and methane-rot. The outcasts flee from the hall. The ultimate “scapes” end up being Crispin and Sharon, whom the crowd abandons in sniggering horror.

Despite the overwhelming urge to recoil from one another's foulness, the couple attempts a final, valiant defiance. They use a 3.05-meter pole to maintain physical distance and a tin-can telephone to communicate. This last-chance technology filters the sound-clashing horror from their voices. But it fails. A fourth assault from the Dynasty of Hatred overwhelms them, and they collapse. Lafferty writes that they are killed by mortal hatred for one another. It proves that The Hand "will not be cheated by any last-minute tricks."

Media and Action at a Distance

I mentioned some paleo-media theory, but a more recent work that this story brings to mind is Action at a Distance: How Are Human Actions Shaped by the Materiality of Media? (2020). This collection includes essays by John Durham Peters (always worth reading), Florian Sprenger, and Christina Vagt. It examines how objects or people can be acted upon without physical contact, ranging from Newtonian physics and Stephen Gray’s electrical experiments to contemporary computer simulations.

The projectors in Lafferty's story are peculiar instruments of action at a distance—what the book describes as the transmission of force or information across a void. The story literalizes this phenomenon as a mechanism of social control. As science fiction, this may not be especially compelling, but as Lafferty’s exploration of media acting at a distance and seemingly more ontologically “real” (the stench), especially in relation to the experience of time and presence, it is.

We see this at the end of the story, when Crispin and Sharon use tin cans to talk to each other while pressing against one another with poles in the same space, using the mediation of clothing, poles, and cans to try to save their marriage against the counter-mediations being projected onto their persons:

The two Babcocks headed into a stiff wind that blew the smell off them pretty well. Why, this would be almost bearable, this life together-apart! Only ten feet apart, and they could breathe. They were hooded and shrouded, of course, and could never actually see each other again, but remembered appearances came to them that were a little less horrible than they had been used to in more recent times. Each pressed his end of the pole with mittened hand, and it was almost like holding hands again.

They even became a little bit jocular in their rusty-voiced banter back and forth.

“Ship to shore, ship to shore!”

“My wife is a rot-headed, smelly bore,” Crispin bawled into his tin can, and they both laughed. “Ship to shore” and “shore to ship” had been their tin-can telephone code when they were children.

Projection in Lafferty's Work

One of the more intriguing examples of this in Lafferty is Doctor Fritz Otto in The Elliptical Grave. Projection is one of its main themes, with the expedition project getting ensnared in its projection ecology. Dr. Fritz is a movie mogul, a biological person and cinematic machine. He possesses the mutational ability to become a living projector. When he does, he can manifest sensory experiences like the physical reality of being buried alive. He can even project a composite world indistinguishable from the actual environment. His bodily presence is action at a distance while in the proximate presence of the projector, himself:

Doctor Fritz sat easy and smiling. He was a man who could project with great power but without strain. It was a comfortable intensity that he had. Doctor Fritz was a dynamo, apparently at rest, his high-speed rotation indicated only by the low humming that came from him (the tune that he hummed unconsciously may have been the old soldiers’ song Wir Lieben die Stürme). And his quiet dynamic activity was also indicated by two green pilot lights (his two green eyes) that indicated that the projection was “all go.”

Lafferty's media-focused stories continually return to this problem. In Action at a Distance, Vagt refers to it as “the phantasm of immediacy.” In story after story, Lafferty attempts to jolt readers out of their accustomed acceptance of the universalizing unreality of modern media by confronting them with the immediacy of his own uncanny media phantasms.

Conclusion: The Nihilistic Argument of Media Saturation

I’ll close with a note on the passage quoted from the story that opens this post—one of my favorite lines in Lafferty on the effects of media saturation. It appears in a Lafferty paratext inside “The Hand With One Hundred Fingers,” credited to Johnathan Fomry Bierce, whose middle name is an Irish term for phantom and whose forename and surname come from two bitterly caustic satirists.

This line crystallizes the central nihilistic argument: that objective truth is an empty fiction (“bogus waters”), and humanity’s preference for comforting simulations has rendered actual reality irrelevant. If subjectivity and objectivity are the same side of a single coin, the obverse a “blank face,” then reality has no intrinsic meaning, no fixed standard. There is no revelation by which truth can be measured, no canon line. That blank face of the coin is bound to media’s annihilation or manipulation of the imago Dei. The Hand’s targeting of a sacramental marriage and the destruction of its children is religiously significant. But I’ll set aside the religious aspects this time.

As I’ve mentioned before, I read Lafferty as a paranoid philosophical Catholic realist, not as anything close to a paranoid postmodern Catholic. The coin passage is one of his most brilliant expressions of the media effects he argues with throughout his media stories.

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