Warning: This article contains spoilers for Andor, Rogue One and Star Wars: A New Hope.
Andor has wrapped up its second and final season. The Disney Star Wars television show follows the adventures of Cassian Andor as he participates in the rebellion against the Galactic Empire after Imperial stormtroopers destroy his entire tribe as a young boy. The series leads straight into the 2016 movie Rogue One, which explores how the Rebel Alliance retrieved the plans for the first Death Star, which in turn leads straight into the original 1977 Star Wars movie, A New Hope which opens with Princess Leia trying to escape Darth Vader who is trying to regain those same plans.
Trained by his adoptive mother, and eventually recruited by one of the rebel leaders, Luthen Rael, Cassian Andor infiltrates Imperial bases, helps rebel cells achieve their missions, and tries desperately to lead some sort of “normal life”, something that proves impossible as he seeks to contribute to overthrowing the Empire.
The first season of Andor covers one year while the second season traverses four years (the show was originally designed for a five-year arc, but budgetary constraints limited it to two). Each three episode “miniseries” explores one particular development in the Rebellion, covering a single year. However, there is a four-year storyline that permeates the season. This concerns the textile manufacturing planet of Ghorman, where the Empire had previously engaged in a massacre that is memorialised in a grand square within the capital city of Palmo. The Empire is especially interested in Ghorman because its planetary core contains one of the vital elements that will power the Death Star.
A small team of Imperial elites are fully aware that to extract the required amount of “kalkite” for the Death Star’s needs would destroy the planet. They have to develop a strategy to make that “palpable” to the Senate and the citizens of the Empire. They do so by infiltrating and manipulating the existing local insurgents, known as the Ghorman Front (inspired by the French Resistance in World War II). Not even the Imperial staff entrusted with this knew the extent of the plan. The end result is nothing less than genocide, with the planet bombarded with firepower, but justified because of the uprising of the locals who attacked Imperials. The Empire controlled media presents the situation as a tragic but necessary response to an increasingly violent planet, committed to overthrowing the ideals and the stability of the Empire. The riot that they actually started is the excuse to start systematic mining of the planet under the guise of self-defence.
In response to this, Senator Mon Mothma from Chandrila, delivers an impassioned and scathing speech to the Imperial Senate. Until this point, she has been a part of Luthen’s resistance trying to expose the Emperor and the Empire as a corrupt and dangerous regime, while hiding behind a mask of being a naïve and idealistic philanthropist heading up charities for the poor and displaced. Eventually, she realises that she can’t hide any longer. She speaks truth to power, trying to expose the heinous crime that has been committed on Ghorman.
“Fellow senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries. I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart… I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza… What happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide!… And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped to create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!”
Dr Robert L. Strain, Jr., the Assistant Professor of Communication at Florida Memorial University, describes how science fiction is “the literature of cognitive estrangement. It arranges “elements of the familiar (and apparently ‘real’) with elements that are re-fictionalized but fundamentally unreal.” Basically, we see in science fiction, elements of our own world, in present political actions, environmental concerns, technological developments, and existential fears etc. reworked to create a plot line in a story. When Mon Mothma gives her speech, she could be speaking into our own time.
She could be talking about the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli government while they claim they are only targeting Hamas. It could be talking about the drug boats from Venezuela and the capture of its corrupt president to legitimise taking control of the nation for its oil reserves. It could be talking about ICE presence in US democratic states and now in airports, to intimidate and manipulate the midterm elections. It could be about the war on Iran, the confusion about its nuclear programme, and whether it is merely a distraction from the Epstein files or another bid for oil control. United States President Donald Trump screams that his nation is going wonderfully well in his State of Union address, while the cost of living continues to rise, health insurance skyrockets, access to Medicaid is restricted, and Americans are being terrorised. The ultra wealthy, on the other hand, seem to be doing very well out of it.
The general public can well ask, what are the actual facts in these situations? The cries of “fake news” and “alternative facts” have rung throughout much of the narrative on these topics, especially on social media.
The ABC has recently released a three-part documentary called The Matter of Facts. In it, award-winning investigative journalist Hamish McDonald, explores how technology corporations, or Big Tech, have changed how we understand facts and reality.
In 1995, the Communications Decency Act was introduced in the United States. In Section 230, one clause reads “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” What this meant was that technology companies were not liable for what was on their social media sites. It gave them immunity and means it is almost impossible to regulate the industry. Fact checkers no longer exist on these platforms which means that users have to do all the work to find out whether something is true or not. When social media is now the main source of people’s news and information, this is a huge problem.
Social media is now the biggest disseminator of false information and many users consume and share it unintentionally. This is known as misinformation. Disinformation, on the other hand, is false information that is deliberately shared to deceive others.
Unfortunately, humans are very vulnerable to being tricked. The creators of disinformation rely on this and the social media’s use of algorithms to spread their content. Algorithms learn what we click on and give us more of the same content to keep us scrolling. They learn all about a user’s gender, age, political leanings, preferences, etc. What they do, however, is tend to focus on things that anger or enrage, as these emotions are ones that are more likely to keep people scrolling. Algorithms sort for whatever is the most inflammatory and make that content the centre of attention. This practice is unseen and has become normalised over the last 10-15 years. Tristan Harris, a Technology Ethicist, believes that, “An algorithm is outsourcing the human choice into a machine’s decision”.
Maria Ressa, a Nobel Prize winning journalist from the Philippines, claims, “The public information ecosystem (is) literally spreading lies six times faster than facts. When you don’t have facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality… Tearing down democracy started with tearing down facts.”
Disinformation or hybrid wars are being waged all around the world. It is classed as a form of warfare because its goal is the disruption and destabilisation of a population. Modern disinformation warfare thrives in current social media usage patterns. Perpetrators isolate an issue with a hint of truth, gather ingredients to make it viral, and then amplify it. This can include creating pages that look like legitimate news platforms, fake influencers or celebrities promoting the issue, and creating chats or groups around the disinformation. Everyday users, unable to tell that it is not true, inadvertently share it, perpetuating the lie.
The lieutenants in this war are “trolls”, humans perpetuating the disinformation, or “bots”, machine generated fake accounts, that act like humans by sharing the fake content. In 2024, Meta identified 4.23 billion fake Facebook accounts.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is an even greater threat in the disinformation war. It is particularly good at generating reality distorting imagery and information and is currently doubling its capacity to perform tasks every few months. Testing shows that, at current rates, humans can only distinguish AI generated content 51 percent of the time.
AI is a computer system that can do tasks otherwise requiring human intelligence. The goal of AI companies is to automate every form of human cognitive labour in the economy and to be able to do every job better than a human. AI can produce social media content quicker, cheaper, and indistinguishable from human-created content. Facts are the casualties.
The identification and reporting on facts used to be part of the important role of journalists and a free, independent press. Truth-telling can be dangerous, however, in places where autocracy is on the rise. One of the first things that is attacked by aspiring autocrats is the press. Think Trump’s “lament” of fighting “fake news” or Elon Musk declaring “journalism is dead – citizen journalism is the future”. Citizens, however, are not trained to deep dive to find evidence and facts and social media platforms are not designed to encourage that. They have a business model that prioritises polarising content rather than quality, truthful information distribution. Because of this huge quantity of disinformation, we have a society that can’t agree on a common set of facts, or even how to determine what a fact actually is.
But facts matter and are worth fighting for.
Three strategies that the documentary promoted included, firstly, becoming educated around the digital landscape and encouraging politicians to put robust, fair, and just legislation in place to protect citizens from AI and Big Tech. Secondly, developing critical thinking skills in order to be able to navigate the misinformation and disinformation around us. Key to this is reading outside the algorithm-created “silo” of social media and, instead, engage with books, journals, credible newspapers, and the like. Professor Maryanne Wolf from the School of Education at UCLA says that “reading is an act of resistance in an age of distraction”. Thirdly, cultivating empathy. When we see the “other” as sinister or enemy, it threatens democracy because it creates extreme polarisation.
Lizzie O’Shea, a lawyer, digital rights advocate and founder of Digital Rights Watch, says, “There is nothing inevitable about the future. The future is ours to shape and the best way we can do that is by being active engagers in our democracy. It is not a spectator sport.”
Jesus was no stranger to speaking truth to power. Sometimes it was simply to correct theological understanding (Matthew 22:23-34; Mark 12:18-27; Luke 20:27-40). Occasionally it was to reprimand behaviour (Matthew 16:1-5). Most seriously, it was to expose corruption and misrepresenting God (Mark 12:38-44, Matthew 23, Mark 11:15-18, Luke 19:45-46, John 2:14-16). Christian individuals and the wider Church are also called to speak truth to power. Robyn Whitaker, Director of the Uniting Church’s Wesley Centre in Melbourne sees Pope Leo as performing a biblically prophetic function, as he calls for peace, critiques the misuse of faith and decries the use of religion for personal, financial, or political gain.
While it can be hard to determine truth and facts in an increasingly complex world, some of which is actually designed to hide and distort it, it is important to continually seek for truth. Not just the truth about the world we live in, but the truth of the gospel. That truth is found in the very person of the incarnated God, Jesus (John 14:6).
Dr Katherine Grocott is a theologian, contemporary jeweller and educator. www.katherinegrocott.com.au.
