The Old Times

A year ago I wrote a manifesto for starting this course. Reading it back, I find I still mean all of it. The trouble is that it was written by someone arriving. It is full of promises about what I would let the course do to me. That was the right document for last September. It is not quite the right one now.

So here is the revised version. Same bones, one new limb, some craft where there were only good intentions, and two promises I can actually fail at.

Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

That proverb has sat over my Substack – Queerly Beloved – since its launch in June. It turns out to govern everything else too, including the machines.

https://substack.com/@qbqueerlybeloved

1. Learning with Courage and Curiosity

• I will keep asking the obvious question, because in a room of thirty people, five others wanted to ask it.
• I will keep learning from people half my age, and keep saying so out loud.
• I will treat each project as an experiment. Some experiments fail. That is what the word means.

2. Authenticity at the Core

• My work will carry honesty, queerness and human dignity, and give voice to people too often overlooked.
• I know what it costs to be unable to say who you are. I was 27 at Edinburgh’s first Pride, married, and not yet able to say it. Everything I make now is on the other side of that.
• If a project feels like someone else’s idea of what I should make, I will stop and ask why I am making it.

3. Community, and Holding the Door

• I will go first. A Welcome Buddy is someone who has walked ahead and come back to say you’ll be all right, and here are a few things that may help. That is the job in every group project too.
• I will make room rather than take it. Experience is only useful if it leaves space for other people’s.
• I will build work that invites people in rather than at them. A book club, a table, a walk people can repeat. The reader stops being an audience and starts taking part.

4. Resilience, Growth and Saying So

• Mistakes, setbacks and failures are material, not evidence.
• This summer I was shortlisted for the AVEVA commission and did not get it. I wrote about that in Mirror Ball rather than quietly not mentioning it. I will keep doing that, because a portfolio with no failures in it is a portfolio nobody believes.
• I will ask for help earlier than feels comfortable, and I will keep the self-care line in this manifesto knowing full well it is the one I am most likely to skip.

5. Joy, Playfulness and Craft

• I will try forms I am not yet good at, and celebrate small wins, including the ones nobody else notices.
• Craft is not the enemy of joy. A weekly deadline has taught me more this summer than a term of good intentions.
• The house rules stay: British English, no em dashes, no evaluative adjectives. Use the strongest fact once. Check every claim and every link, because Wikipedia got one of mine wrong. Put two things side by side and trust the reader to make the connection.

6. Slow AI, Human Judgement

This is the new one. It draws on the SAGE AI Framework, Slow AI for Generative Ethics, developed by Dr Idrees Rasouli in collaboration with Professor Ho Law for the AVEVA headquarters programme. I worked within it while making Revealing the Code.

SAGE asks for slow thinking and deliberate friction in fast technological systems. It treats AI not as something that drives outcomes on its own, but as a shared creative space where human judgement, imagination and responsibility stay at the centre. It also talks about building humane processes into rapid cycles. A weekly Tuesday deadline with a fact-checking rule turns out to be exactly that. I had been doing it since June without knowing it had a framework.

Revealing the Code tested all this on Polari and machine language. Polari was a code built by queer people so the powerful could not read them. Machine language is a code built by the powerful that reads us. After twenty years in equality work, I find that interesting rather than frightening, and I do not intend to look away from it.

• I will pause before I respond. When AI hands me something, I will read it critically before I use it. Friction is a feature, not a fault.
• I will treat what it gives me as material for reflection, not finished output. A first answer is a draft, not a verdict.
• I will use it openly, and name it wherever it has touched my work.
• I will keep the judgement, the imagination and the responsibility mine.
• I will stay awake to what the code carries: who it includes, who it misreads, and whose context it misses.
• And one of my own, beyond SAGE: I will not use it to fake experience I have not had, or feeling I do not feel.

7. Looking Outward, Shipping Forward

Last year this section was about dreaming. The dreams have started turning into deadlines, which is better and considerably more frightening.

• Queerly Beloved publishes every Tuesday at 8am and has not missed one since June. This year it stops being a newsletter with rooms in it and becomes something people can walk into.
• Complemental puts the method into sound: the published book in one ear, the private letter in the other, and no narrator to explain the gap.
• Rites of Passage begins on Advent Sunday. We deserve better ceremonies than the ones we were handed, and I intend to make some.
• Work leaves the building. Peterborough taught me that the gap between a good idea and a finished thing is where the actual work lives.

What I refuse

I will not make work about a community I have not sat down with. If a project needs a voice I have not got, I will go and find the person who has it, or I will make something else.

What can be checked in June

Two things in Queerly Beloved have gone slowly for good reasons and are now in danger of standing still. So: the podcast will have launched, and the café will have happened at least once. Not planned. Happened. You are all witnesses.

Closing

Last year I entered with openness, humility and excitement. Those still apply, but they are the virtues of a guest. This year I am closer to a resident, and residents have different duties: to finish what they start, to hold the door, and to leave the place better than they found it.

Still not a rulebook. Still a living promise. It has simply grown a spine.

Or, as they said in the back bar: nanti standing still.

Source: Rasouli, I. with Law, H. (2026) SAGE AI Framework: Slow AI for Generative Ethics. AVEVA and Anglia Ruskin University. Dr Rasouli’s profile: aru.ac.uk/people/idrees-rasouli