Tuesday 27 September 2016

Exaro - Notification


Exaro-related postings will remain on this blog but may be transferred to another site so that they are on the record but no longer distract from the main purpose of Position Reserved which is to review political and philosophical issues as they arise. 

As of the date of this posting, I have no further information on Exaro Holdings Ltd. There is nothing to add to the account given on July 21st other than to say that the Shareholders Meeting never took place for reasons that remain obscure. The Company, therefore, has not been wound up as of today but continues to exist under the effective control of New Sparta.

ExaroNews (the trading subsidiary of Exaro Holdings) has ceased functioning as an investigative journalism site. Exaro Holdings may or may not be wound up on whatever terms are appropriate and ExaroNews may or may not be sold on or even revived on different terms.

I have no current knowledge of any of these theoretical options and I have had no communication about the Company from the Company since the first half of August.  I await proposals from the majority shareholder when and as he or his agents can make them.

Since I resigned as a Director over failure to provide information in a timely manner, I have no rights to information except as a shareholder on equal terms to other shareholders.  I now consider this a private matter that no longer requires further public communication. Please refer all queries to New Sparta who are the majority shareholders in Exaro Holdings Ltd. 

Postscript - May 1st, 2017

Exaro Holdings Ltd and ExaroNews Ltd. were both liquidated in January 2017. I had ceased to be a Director in July 2016 and so had no information of consequence except that obliged to be provided to me as a shareholder between that date and the liquidation. Naturally, as a former Director, I co-operated fully and within the law with the liquidators. As far as I know the liquidators hold any residual assets and the former shareholders ceased to have any further rights in the matter.

We have decided not to share the detail our analysis of why ExaroNews failed, as provided to the liquidators in full. The fundamental reason was the sudden withdrawal of funds by the main shareholder (New Sparta Holdings) for reasons wholly unrelated to editorial matters and related solely to internal decision-making within the New Sparta Group. At the immediately preceding Board Meeting to the one that decided on closure, New Sparta had, in fact, promised funding until December 31st, 2016 and had agreed to a plan to provide a new co-operative approach to editorial direction as well as the formation of a Board Committee (of which I was to be a Member) to develop a revised long term Business Plan in collaboration with the new Joint Editors, David Hencke and Mark Conrad. The reversal of funding came without warning to either myself or the editorial staff but we were persuaded that new information unrelated to Exaro meant that the shareholder was reasonable in their decision from their commercial perspective.

One unfortunate consequence of the decision was that there was a serious hiatus of management after my resignation in which no one spoke for Exaro and assets were allowed to degenerate (including the loss of social media assets). There was thus no approved source for comment on exuberant claims about Exaro being made by a somewhat jubilant mainstream media that saw an irritant, an alternative model for investigative journalism, collapse before their eyes. A longstanding politically inspired campaign of denigration (equally directed at Metropolitan Police investigators), in which legitimate questions about sourcing were intermixed with downright falsities derived from a special interest position, was not contested. I (and others) had to watch idly as the wolves circled the dying creature ready to feast on its flesh which it duly did.

Having said that, without going into detail, it is my belief that some errors of judgement may have been made by the then-Editor, who had been released of his role for cost reasons only, although these seem to have been errors of judgement (the situation remains unclear) shared by the Metropolitan Police investigation into child abuse. At the time of closure, the new Editors advised that they had identified two points of possible concern (of which I have no record) and that their intention was to undertake an internal investigation and then publish that investigation on the web site, admitting any errors related to those particular points of concern. The Board agreed to this procedure and gave plenipotentiary powers to the new Editorial team in this matter. Unfortunately, that decision was made meaningless by the funding crisis within a very few weeks. 

At the time of the decision, the new Editors believed that, regarding these issues of concern, their investigation could not now take place and so no further public comment could be made on what happened or why, but the general view was that a full and frank statement on these matters would have permitted rapid reputational recovery if funding had been secured. Needless to say, no such recovery was permitted. For the sake of clarity, there can be no prejudgment of these areas of concern as, in fact, errors with the information currently at our disposal - it is quite possible that closer analysis may have resulted in a demonstration that Exaro News made no errors of judgement according to its own brief as investigative journalism web site. We simply do not know.

The final conclusions on the Exaro Project are these. First, that it was a noble experiment which, despite the issues raised in the final year, undertook important work over more than half a decade and re-energised investigative journalism 'holding power to account'. It made important enemies with far more resources and with little interest in fighting fair or with integrity. It was surprising in some ways that it fought on for so long. Second, that it was commercial and funding issues, not editorial issues (there was no impending serious court case, for example) that were fundamentally at the root of its failure - the possible but unclarified editorial problems that appeared very late in the day would have been surmountable with will and good management in the six months to December 31st, 2016. 

Those commercial and funding issues arose out of a flawed business plan which offers lessons to successor organisations. Management was weak and editorial was permitted far too much power after an initial year when it was reasonable to grant editorial full power in order to build the brand. Too much resource was poured into investigation (without check and balance on editorial decisions) and not enough into commercial infrastructure. In the long run, the business model may have been wholly unfeasible (most other similar entities rely on foundation grants) but the decisions made after the first year of operation and the lack of firm guidance by the majority shareholder and the Board (of which I was a Non-Executive Member) reduced the chances of making that model feasible progressively as each subsequent year passed. 

The decision to give funding for six months in June included not merely a revision of the business plan but a preparedness to close the business in an orderly fashion if the 'numbers failed to stack up' in the longer term. My advice to successors who do not want to rely on Foundation funds (which usually comes with a political agenda of some sort) is a) introduce a corporate governance system that constrains the Editor from treating the entity as a wholly non-commercial organisation and b) to be uncompromising from the beginning in including a commercial dimension and a strategy for exit (or sustainable short term revenue generation) from the very beginning and so ensure a strong management with authority to implement that plan. I take full responsibility for not being stronger myself in pressing for this approach although my minority shareholder status and the fact that the majority shareholder was the provider of all loan finance (and was generous in doing so) would have limited my influence in this respect. 

Finally, if something like this, publicly challenging and reputationally vulnerable, is to be closed down, I would suggest that it is a false economy to simply cut all funding and not maintain a 'de minimis' fund in reserve for preservation of the assets, the maintenance of obligations and the continued independent management of reputational fall-out. Personally, I suffered no reputational fall-out. Any attempt to attack my role was dealt with robustly and factually and, in the end, there were only two possible criticisms of the business - inappropriate handling of its closure and unresolved questions about editorial management of aspects of the child abuse story. Both required sensitive handling. The complete closure of the ability to handle such issues in a robust and factual way perhaps worked to the disadvantage of others rather than myself. What was required was a plan for closure that included reputational management.

The matter is now closed. By law, no previous shareholder or Director can speak for the Exaro brand or Companies which are now in the hands of liquidators who, in my experience to date, are highly professional. I have received no public criticism and would deal with it robustly if it came. Exaro itself as a brand suffered reputational damage that may have had some negative effects on those involved but it is more the case that its important contribution to challenging the mainstream media in a way that, for all its mistakes, represented a basic commitment to traditional journalistic values was diminished in a campaign of general denigration led by largely right of centre newspapers (although Exaro itself was non-partisan). I do not regret the experience. Many facts are now in the public domain (still available, just, on the Public Internet Archive) and some very powerful people were discomfited. If it is proven that any errors of judgement editorially caused material harm to an innocent party, then I can only regret that the Editorial Team was not permitted by the pressure of events to undertake its review and so clarify the position of the web site in those respects. That inability to review left grey areas that should have been resolved professionally. Mais, maintenant, c'est fini!




Saturday 30 July 2016

On the Supernatural

I want to dispute the value of the term 'supernatural' - the perceived non-natural that is not 'at hand', immediately and potentially useful or easily explicable, and not that material universe that is based on what we can reasonably know or trust to be so from those who do claim to know on the basis of science. The term, which seems not to have been used before the 1520s, has shunted a number of categories into one basket - a problem of accounting for aspects of the world if you insist on creating a meaning outside of it, some things that happen to people for which there is no immediate accounting and the various imaginative creations that have been projected onto the world or exist in that liminal zone where imagination creates functionally useful assets in society for profit, pleasure or social control.

The creation of the idea of the 'supernatural' has separated out a whole set of mind events from other mind events but also other events in the world from the world and packaged them as something 'other' yet culturally identifiable. It is part of the process by which we have failed to critique religion, human perceptual frailties and the imaginative economy alike but also failed to appreciate the complexity of humanity and so the value to it of absurd beliefs and sometimes radical imaginative creativity. Worst of all, the concept includes real events for which there is no current explanation and associates them negatively with absurd belief and the products of human imagination without anything other than a reliance on an equally dubious radical rationalism. It then puts all these in one box where everything in it can be safely dismissed as 'non-scientific', constructions of the human mind, of the hysterical or weak-minded in some quarters and so of little interest or value.

Far better, surely, to separate the three categories of the supernatural - faith, psi and creativity - and reintegrate them back into one world view that is fully 'natural' (that is, ultimately part of the same universe) and so part of the human condition. In other words, treat them critically but with some respect as all human-related. It may complicate matters to do so but would it not offer us the chance to be more true to human reality and help us walk away from attempts to manage what has been called supernatural through denial and alienatory strategies. We should adopt a radical naturalism that includes these phenomena. By restoring the 'supernatural' fully to the natural, bringing it back down to earth so to speak, the opportunity is created not only for a more open analysis of the function of religion, experience and creativity but this change also enables a more profound critique of the thinking systems that try to take the supernatural and create a system out of it that then seeks to command nature without cause or justice.

We think here of non-dualist philosophies and pan-psychism in particular, neither of which explain the world better than a naturalist materialism that takes into account the material basis of the human mind's possible abilities, not only to create a world for itself as observer but also to respond (possibly) to forces that, while mysterious in effects, still have a material basis even if we do not yet have the tools to understand how they operate. What for example may a demon be? A real entity created by God and now rejected? A psychological projection of inner turmoil? An imaginative creation functionally useful in controlling an ignorant person? Or a material external effect on vulnerable minds? At least one reputable psychiatrist seems to think there are really existing evil spirits out there and is about to release a book on it, already touted by the Washington Post.

Personally I tend to the second and third in this particular case but things get more complicated when we speak of ESP (extra-sensory perception) and PK (psychokinesis). These are experiences that sometimes have explanations that show fraud or delusion or coincidence effects but sometimes show patterns in some people at some times that are quite simply not so easily explicable. The demonic possession outlined by Gallagher might easily be transferred to this category of events. Shunting all these into the category of the supernatural, exiling them from the natural, is intellectual cowardice. However, equally, simply saying that they do not exist (scepticism) is no more valid than asserting that they definitely do exist (faith). They may exist but, in possibly existing, they should be seen as natural phenomena with no requirement for alien beings or gods or demons outside nature or materiality and every requirement for understanding better the way the human mind works in its relationship with its own material and social environment (which latter is ultimately just an emanation from the material world).

Mind arises from matter and creates (as information and through communication) a world of intangibles that would cease to exist if the material substrate was destroyed and yet this fluid world is different from inert matter. It could be argued that a more effective model than the split betwen the natural and the supernatural would be between inert and manipulative matter (which might include many of us humans most of the time) and consider something we might have called supermatter within the natural if we were lazy. This element within the material universe but 'super' the expression of the material world in terms of an inert substrate is represented by the mind of individual when it constructs the intangible and cross-communicates with other individuals to create social mind-stuff. Social mind-stuff (culture) is used to create not only the conditions for the manipulation of inert matter but also the conditions for the manipulation of itself, a situation complicated by the self-evidently material base for a new category of inert matter that mimics the mind-stuff of humanity, artificial intelligence, and which, in turn, is capable of entering intangibles into human minds and culture and eventually to manipulate matter just as humans can and do.

With artificial intelligence, it is as if inert matter is catching up with us as matter manipulators, thanks to our own mind manipulation of matter in creating matter that can manipulate matter (the binary code that is the basis for machine computation). Yet all of this is fundamentally materially based. Everything 'mind' is lodged in matter and cannot survive without the survival of the substrate of matter, no matter how manipulated by mind. And so, putting the invented God-things and the products of the imagination aside, we can return to 'unexplained phenomena' and reasonably assume that these two aspects of the case are products of matter directly (the mystery of things not explained which may simply mean that we do not yet understand matter fully) or indirectly as the product of mind in its relationship to matter (as in perceptual delusion) or, finally, as mind working on itself within its material substrate (as in the belief in the God-origin of miracles or the Hollywoodisation of the vampire or werewolf).

So, what I propose is that we abandon the separation of the natural and supernatural as an early modern invention (certainly not something the Ojibwa, say, would understand as a correct interpretation of the world) and re-think the world as one material world:-
  • which we do not entirely understand (leaving room for scepticism about scepticism when effects are unexplained) but which we know reasonably to have a material (natural) base so that all things are ultimately natural and 
  • where the material substrate permits the construction of mind that in turn invents itself, including the conceits of the 'supernatural' (now just a cultural phenomenon whether of God-things or werewolves) based on the frailties of perception and the genius of the imagined.

It is certainly plausible that dream states can create gods and demons. On the other hand, the emergent social mind now also creates tools that mimic the naturally emergent mind (artificial intelligence) and which are apparently immune from individual or social bias (assuming the inputs are logical) and of anything inexplicable. Once we have disposed of god-things and cultural artefacts, we are still left with a residue of the inexplicable whether related to our human minds or to events in the world. There is no mind event that is not emergent from our own minds. The conceptualisation by a mind of a mind event outside itself represents no more that this created mind is a real mind than the mind of an artificial intelligence (as one currently stands) represents a real mind. A material substrate, of which we may not yet know everything and may never know all we need to know to understand it, is still required for all human and silicon and even alien mind events. Even demons are likely to have a material substrate somewhere to justify their existence.

Psi (ESP and PK) and unusual mind events that may or may not exist but they do not need to scare us if they do exist. They are clearly relatively rare and arise from peculiar circumstances. As natural phenomena, they are worthy of study with an open mind even if the final conclusions are either that they are all delusions of emergent human minds or explicable in terms of micro-effects in nature that we had not previously understood - or are simply things in the world that cannot be explained. We have to accept that it is not the lot of humanity (even aided by machine intelligence) to know everything. Absolute knowledge of a system by something within that system is not attainable unless one falls back on the insane belief that Man can become God.

To reverse the formulation of Gyrus in his 'North', it is not 'the preciptation of the gross earthly realm out of the aetheric infinity embracing it' that we are dealing with but 'the precipitation of an aetheric breadth of possibility out of the inert material realm embracing it'. This allows us to position the natural and the supernatural in a different conceptual context - that of immanence and transcendence. The standard model for the supernatural it is to see nature as immanent (which parallels the idea that God is immanent in nature, in all that can be seen and experienced and measured) and the supernatural as transcendent (insofar as the mental model is of God being outside nature, transcending it, as well as immanent).

With God and all forms of prime mover and all forces external to nature removed from the equation, nature can remain immanent but as total materiality - that is, all that is in the universe and all that is in the universe is matter or energy in some form. Transcendence can be re-cast as what emerges out of nature that has to be within nature by the nature of things but which is different in quality - that is, it is self-reflexive consciousness or mind and its associated tools such as reasoning. This raises interesting questions because there is no easy binary here between matter and mind. Self-reflexive consciousness and reasoning as a tool arise not in some sudden spark of creation and binary difference but evolve very slowly over vast tracts of time. The difference between the thing that is self-reflexive and aware and the thing that is not is not 'created' in an instant by some external touch but evolves. Self-reflexiveness and ability to think also varies even within a community of individuals in society in real time and within one individual, often from second to second.

Nor should we fall into the trap of valorising the self-reflexive consciousness so that a mythic narrative emerges that automatically assumes that the more conscious the entity then the higher the value - this is the error of cod-existentialism that valorises untestable claims to 'authenticity'. No attribute is of intrinsic value except situationally - from the stance of the individual or 'society'. No external force ensures a positive valuation, certainly no force outside nature (the world and all that is the case within it). Neither consciousness not authenticity are things-in-themselves but are rather states of being that shift in time in a Heraclitean flux much as 'mind' emerges transcendentally over long periods of time and in fits and starts.

The point here is not to create another binary (always the instinct of the simple analyst of the universe, the raw and the cooked, the hot and the cold, the good and the bad) but to have a concept to hand - the transcendental - that can shift its meaning from something external and unknowable and outside reality (when the supernatural is actually just a sub-set of human imaginative invention) to something that transcends inert matter existentially, that is, that emerges from out of matter (transcends its substrate) to become something that forms and creates itself, not only as the individual mind and personality with its reasoning, conceptualisation, creative imaginings, inventions, discoveries and meanings but as the transcendent creation of cultures of all levels, societies of all types, collaborative artistic creation and scientific discovery, the academic project to increase the bounds of knowledge, the prosecution of projects (not excluding business and war) and so forth.

Thus, it is mind, culture and society that are at least potentially 'supernatural' (on a trajectory that seems to be increasingly disconnected from its material substrate over time) in this different interpretation of the terms although I would dispute that anything can ever be disconnected from materiality. What we traditionally think of as supernatural in two of its key categories (the invention of meaning and imaginative creation) is simply a sub-set of something that is not so much 'above nature' as the highest part of nature (summa autem natura?), at least as seen from the point of view of those who have the ability (the self-reflexive conscious mind) to observe 'nature'. 'Nature' itself does not observe itself but is a thing in which we are embedded and which we have reconstructed from our observations into an abstract.

Matter in itself is inert but there is a distinctly different quality in that which can observe itself and its own substrate and environment. Either there is nothing supernatural here or we might deal with the problem by recasting 'nature' to mean not all that there is in the universe but all that there is that is not self-consciously reflexive and aware of itself, I think this is intellectually lazy - an essentialism after instead of before the fact designed to over-privilege the human (and indeed the thinking machine, alien and demon by pushing them into the place where once we positioned God and a conscious Nature. It might be better here to speak of a radicalisation of a part of nature itself and so stay 'grounded' (literally). This conceit also forces us to consider at what point artificial intelligence elides from being part of the inert material substrate and joins us humans as 'summa autem natura'. It also begs the question of the possibility of independent self-reflexive entities emerging out of the material in the past, existent now or in the future from the material substrate - which opens the door to evidence-based acceptance of aliens, emergent god-things, spirits, angels and demons (to speak in human terms).

The actual evidence for these latter is flaky to say the least but it would be intellectually dangerous to assume that, if the material substrate had permitted 'summa autem natura' in relation to ourselves as human beings, that it might not permit the emergence of similar minds and entities or other minds and entities elsewhere in the universe and/or in time and that they might have a character and experience very different from ours. After all, we are on the path ourselves to creating potentially transcendent artificial intelligences that might well fit the bill for a form of independent self-reflexive and creative consciousness.

This leaves us with the last category of popular ideas of the supernatural, outside religion and popular and folk culture, the paranormal. Psi (ESP and PK and other events) are claimed to happen to people by people themselves (though not easily observable by third parties as true and reliable) and may or may not be entirely delusory events whether as a not understood coincidence or as misperception or as fraud by third parties (and so forth). The immanence-transcendence model here inverts itself because a deluded mind might be seen as a warped transcendence but, if there is anything in these events (and we have an open mind here), then they are still events within nature and not supernatural. They are part of the material substrate and so part of the natural. They are simply natural events that we either cannot or do not understand.

Psychological effects that are interpreted as 'paranormal' (a better term than cloaking these events with the term supernatural) and physical events involving a warping of our understanding of causation, time and space may not be automatically considered to be absolutely impossible so much as probably impossible with the information and reasoning at our disposal as transcendent minds at this time and in this space.

If the concept of the supernatural is something we have inherited from our own earlier stages of development, it works functionally as part of our cultural tool kit insofar as we value religion or create imaginatively for our own psychological needs. It is equally a rather sloppy way of moving forward as self-reflexive consciousnesses in our own right. It would be better to make a functional assumption of absolute materialism and then enclose all current definitions of the supernatural as properties of 'summa autem natura' (the highest form of nature from our own perspective), excepting the 'paranormal'. This latter should be separated out as either a delusion or, on further investigation, an unknown element of the totality of materiality.

The 'paranormal' becomes a potentiality for knowing rather than something known, mirroring our creation of artificial intelligence as a potentiality for consciousness rather than as something conscious in itself now. The first offers the potential for changing our perception of material reality without any necessity for 'spiritual' inventions while the latter offers the potential for changing our assumptions about the uniqueness of our own transcendence (whether later to be challenged further by the discovery of aliens or demons is probably something not within the capability of current science). Our working assumption can be that we do not have to worry over much about aliens and demons (except as cultural artefacts) but that we should be concerned about understanding artificial intelligence and we should continue to be sceptically interested in the paranormal without throwing too much resource at it.

Beyond this, we continue to transcend as much as we can because that is what we do subject to our all-too-obvious dependence on immanent matter (after all, we die!). We continue, driven by our own 'nature' at least amongst those so inclined, to employ our transcending minds in the manipulation and exploitation of the material universe, of 'nature', in order to assist our continuing process of transcendence - regardless of conservative attempts to try to give immanence/matter priority over our own transcendence. We think here of those retrograde elements in the green movement that go beyond sustainability in our own interest as transcendent-within-immanence beings into a preference for the invented rights of 'nature' over humanity or those 'spiritual' elements who insist on inverting the situation and trying to give an untenable transcendent quality to nature itself whether overtly as God or as some form of pantheism or pan-psychism.

The supernatural thus can quietly disappear from view except as cultural artefact (meeting psychological needs) or as an incorrect descriptive term for that which is not known or cannot be known. It is a term we no longer need philosophically if we have the concept of emergent consciousness as 'summa autem natura' (this is the best term I have to hand and welcome others' thoughts) from its own perspective as observer of its own condition when even Psi (ESP and PK), aliens, gods, angels and demons can only either be inventions of ourselves or a knowable (but not necessarily by us) part of nature.

Thursday 21 July 2016

Exaro - The End Game

At a Board Meeting yesterday morning, the Directors of Exaro Holdings Ltd. voted to wind up Exaro, the online investigative news channel. This is now public knowledge as a result of a Tweet from the former Editor so there is no need to abstain from comment. At the meeting (which I attended through a dial-in call), I abstained on the vote not because I thought that the winding up was unreasonable given the commercial situation but because I had not been consulted on the matter beforehand and because I had concerns about a number of internal issues which I am confident would be resolved once I had drawn them to the Board's attention. Immediately after the Board Meeting, I resigned as a Director of Exaro Holdings Limited and write now only as a minority shareholder and private individual.

In two weeks (date as yet undetermined), there will be a shareholders meeting. Since I speak for only 18.2% of the shares (20% if proxied by others), the outcome is a foregone conclusion but I think it important, because Exaro has a public interest aspect, to lay out such facts as will set the record straight for the future and to raise one issue of public interest.

First, let me make it clear that the decision by the majority shareholder to withdraw support is a commercially sound and reasonable one. I will have more to note on the commercial aspects below but I have no reason to believe that the decision had anything to do with editorial content.

At the prior Board Meeting, a number of decisions were taken - that the Company was not commercially viable under current arrangements and that, while the Company was acknowledged to have public interest value, a time frame should be set for ensuring that the Company became viable. Support was committed to the end of 2016 on strict condition that the Company had a business plan and business model which would demonstrate incontrovertibly long term commercial viability. The task of creating such a re-orientation of the business was given to the Managing Director and a Sub-Committee of the Board was set up (including myself) to work on such a plan once immediate issues related to editorial staffing were resolved (expected to be around this time).

The commercial viability of an investigative journalist unit was always going to be a issue of concern. Some errors were made at the beginning which may be useful to any who follow in our footsteps. There is no point in going over old history but the bottom line is that the original plan that my team formulated was put on ice because a judgement was made (a reasonable one which I fully accepted at the time) that the first year should place all resources into the hands of the Editor in order to establish the brand and the positioning. My short period in management thus coincided with a period in which there was no management other than to support editorial. By prior agreement, I ceased to take a managing role after six months and became a Non-Executive Director based on my minority shareholding. I attended Board Meetings but had little role other than to assist in defence of reputation, more as an associated individual than as an official spokesperson.

During this lengthy period, I repeatedly noted that the Editor had accrued too much power under the guise of 'editorial independence'. This meant that the first stage strategy of creating the brand through content had morphed into a commitment to the expense of content without adequate commercial revenue to support it. The primary lesson for those who follow us is to institute strong management and commercial control of editorial from the very beginning in every area except direct content and to ensure an editor is in place who has a strong understanding of market realities. No private sector entity can be a bottomless pit into which money must be poured.

From this perspective, I wholly accept that the senior shareholder and creditor, evaluating the matter with his own team, came to the conclusion that Exaro had become such a bottomless pit even if I am disappointed that the reversal of policy at the preceding Board Meeting was not undertaken with some prior consultation with the Director representing the minority shareholders. My abstention was a function of being surprised by the policy but should not be construed as disagreement with it. The lack of consultation simply meant that there was no time for this Director to consider carefully the 'interests of the Company' beforehand. However, the decision is now accepted as in the best interests of the company as commercial entity. Clearly, the Managing Director recommended that there was no viable commercial rescue plan and that we would be wasting more funds and time to create one. I am afraid that I have no magic bullet to hand that says otherwise. I would only have been able to say otherwise if I had been directly engaged in the evaluation and around six months' further of risk money had been made available. It would have been too much to expect the majority shareholder to risk more at this stage.

Under these circumstances, I respect the decision of the primary funder and go further in thanking him for his exceptional public interest support for Exaro to date (far beyond the point that I might have done in his situation) and for his personal commitment to editorial independence throughout. I have no reason to believe that editorial content played any role in the decision. It was never an issue at any Board Meeting throughout the history of Exaro although of course I cannot speak for the final decision because I was out of the loop on that one. My judgement is that it did not.

If anything, the funder's faith in editorial was not reciprocated by editorial which proved somewhat unco-operative in considering the commercial base for the operation at every stage but this is not a time to cast stones. Yet, whatever the decision is, it is not the 'act of vandalism' claimed by one outgoing figure. It was a probably necessary final act after a long period of being tolerant of an over-emphasis on the public interest mission of Exaro without understanding commercial realities. Exaro never was intended to be a charity. It was designed to be a new business model for investigative journalism. In that, it has failed.

The question is now - what next?  Formally, the Company will be wound up (whatever my minority vote says) in about two weeks' time. Because it does not have a business model to hand, it is not salvageable unless a third party magically appears and makes an offer for the Company or the assets to the majority investor to which I must agree (and to which, unless obviously destuctive, I would agree). Such a purchaser would either have to understand the need to invest in the business planning agreed one month ago with or without me or find some synergy with existing operations. I will assume that it is not salvageable and will be wound up in two weeks.

However, I have one last public interest concern. The historic work and data of Exaro provides an important contemporary historical archive of some four years of investigation and it should be preserved. If it has no commercial value to New Sparta and is not of interest to a third party, then the Board (of which I am no longer a member) should consider this public interest aspect of the case and either preserve it as an archive asset within New Sparta available to the public (which would be of minimal cost) or transfer its brand and content to either an individual or public interest institution who can at the least maintain it for scholars and at the best maintain it for public access. I am raising this concern with the Company and hope that the archive can be maintained by transferring it by agreement to a third party before the winding up - if no third party appears to acquire the assets for commercial purposes by the due date. I shall keep readers informed of my progress.

Finally, for all the failures, it was a noble experiment and, although controversial (which is no bad thing), for some four years it did hold power to account on many fronts. The dominance of the child abuse story has been much exaggerated as even a cursory review of the UK archive Page of the online journal would demonstrate. Even the child abuse narrative (about which, in retrospect, it became a little over-concerned) undoubtedly helped to raise awareness of the necessity for the State to stop pretending that institutionalised sexual abuse was something to be ignored and so tolerated. The modernising elements of the State have picked up on this, helped also by awareness that, as in the case of Rotherham, tolerance of sexual abuse was not a matter of Right or Left but of flaccid elites turning their gaze away from the vulnerable and the difficult in society. The engine of reform has now started and we will see a very different cultural framework for the protection of the vulnerable in this area within three to five years - Exaro contributed to that greatly. I am honoured to have initiated the Exaro project and only regret the necessity of having to become little more than a supportive bystander for so many years

I want to give express my personal appreciation to Jerome Booth, whose patient funding over many years cannot be dismissed by those whose own money is not at stake, to my former colleagues on the Exaro Holdings Board and the Company's advisers, to the former Editor Mark Watts (who may have broken with Exaro in recent months but who was instrumental to the development of its original mission) and to all the editorial and staff of Exaro who showed unstinting commitment and who it would be invidious to name individually lest someone be forgot. And a word for the original team at one of our companies PendryWhite who set up the design and branding and the online platform on a shoestring budget under the direction of Jenina Bas.

And so the wheel of fortune turns ... any serious interest in either the archive idea or some 'deus ex machina' to save the business should go to either the Chairman of Exaro Holdings, Jerome Booth, at New Sparta or you can connect with me on LinkedIn for a chat. The silence may, of course, be deafening ...

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/timpendry