"The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers" (1974/1976)

“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.”

It would be fun to have a chrestomathy of Lafferty’s ideas about media with smart connections drawn to media studies for at least two reasons: Lafferty put a huge amount of intellectual effort into creating a new media imaginay, and there is nothing like him. So far what je did has been a dead end.

Some story candidates select themselves: “The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers” would have to be included, along with pieces such as “Splinters,” “Thou Whited Wall,” "Calamities of the Last Pauper," and so on. Once you capture that category (the Lafferty media-broadcast story), along with relevant passages from the novels, especially Not to Mention Camels (1976) and The Elliptical Grave (1989), the purview explodes. I’d certainly want the extraordinary sections on the Age of Silent Radio from The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (1977) and the bits about media in the early pages of Serpent's Egg (1987). Soon, the choices become difficult because Lafferty’s ideas about media are inseparable from his thinking about consensus and conspiracy. And once you include that, you’re looking at a big slice of his work.

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

Yet I think 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 move concert when it really matters. The appearance of decentralization hides economic coordination: the way broligarchs fall in line with or bully state power, or the way frontier AI firms present a united front when killing any peep of legislation that would impose oversight or externally enforced safety constraints. The question of centralized media ownership and decentralizing media channels is, of course, very complicated when it comes to signal control. That said, the stakes are uncomfortably close to where we find ourselves now.

In most of Lafferty’s media thinking, there is a great deal that overlaps with that of Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) and Edward Bernays (1891-1995), two of the earliest and most influential thinkers to frame mass communication as a tool of social control. He must have known about their work. Lasswell was a political scientist who studied World War I propaganda and then concluded that modern societies needed systematic management of opinion, from which came his famous media formula—who says what to whom through what channel with what effect. He believed mass media was essential to guiding public behavior. One must keep a chokehold on social order.

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

In the story’s world, there is a powerful union of Person-Projector firms known as The Hand With One-Hundred Fingers, and The Hand dictates truth. Its forms manipulate the global electronic personality, making reality a mirage. And because reality has become a mirage, The Hand can instantly enhance or degrade citizens. All they have to do is project a consensus onto world television and onto persons. This ensures there is no difference between "seeming to have special attributes and really having them." One area that Lafferty gets very right is that this all comes down to subscription services. Those who pay the fees to The Hand, please the media lords; they have access to success. Dissenters are biologically and socially rewritten into bestial persons whose presence is offensive to the senses.

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

The outcasts created by The Hand retreat to what Lafferty calls sly halls. These are sanctuaries where the excluded have a small amount of culture and self-respect. Then The Hand makes a breakthrough, and the sanctuary of the sly halls is breached. 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 using a 3.05-meter pole to maintain physical distance and a tin-can telephone to speak. 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."

I mentioned some paleo-media theory, but a more recent work the story brings to mind is Action at a Distance: How Are Human Actions Shaped by the Materiality of Media? (2020). It includes essays by John Durham Peters (always worth reading), Florian Sprenger, and Christina Vagt. The collection looks at 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 strange 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 Crispen 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 thesmell off them pretty well. Why, this would be almostbearable, this life together-apart! Only ten feet apart, andthey could breathe. They were hooded and shrouded, ofcourse, and could never actually see each other again, butremembered appearances came to them that were a littleless horrible than they had been used to in more recenttimes. 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-voicedbanter back and forth. “Ship to shore, ship to shore!” “My wife is a rot-headed, smelly bore,” Crispin bawledinto his tin can, and they both laughed. “Ship to shore” and“shore to ship” had been their tin-can telephone code whenthey were children.

One of the more interesting examples of this in Lafferty is Doctor Fritz Otto in The Elliptical Grave. Projection as 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 has the mutational ability to become a living projector. When doing that, 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 dieStürme). 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 return to this problem. In Action at a Distance, Vagt calls “the phantasm of immediacy.” In media story after media story, Lafferty tries to snap readers out of having become accustomed to the universalizing unreality of modern media by confronting them with the immediacy of his own uncanny media phantasms.

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.

It concretizes the central nihilistic argument: that objective truth is an empty fiction (“bogus waters”), and that humanity’s preference for comforting simulations has rendered actual reality irrelevant. If subjectivity and objectivity are the same side of the same 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. That face of the coin that is left blank is bound to media’s annihilation or manipulation of the imago Dei. That the Hand targets a sacramental marriage and destroys its children is religiously significant. But I'm going to set the religious aspects aside this time.

As I’ve written 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.

The Hand One-Hundred Fingers Notes.pdf

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