CONCEPT
Attentional Agreements
Explicit, gender-symmetric negotiations between domestic partners about the allocation of attention — counter-practice against production bleed at the relational level.
Attentional agreements are deliberate, specific, renegotiable arrangements between domestic partners that distribute both the attention itself and the responsibility for monitoring it. Unlike the implicit arrangements Gregg documented in communication-era households — where one partner (typically the woman) silently performed boundary labor while the other benefited from the attentional deficit — effective attentional agreements require each partner to monitor her own presence, not just the other's, and to take responsibility for the quality of her engagement rather than relying on her partner to detect and correct absences. The agreements specify not merely hours but qualities of attention, distinguishing physical presence with cognitive absence from genuine availability to the emotional and relational demands of domestic life.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Agreements must survive the specific asymmetries of the AI era. An agreement that assigns monitoring to the same person who has always monitored is not a counter-practice; it is a formalization of inequality. The agreement must redistribute the monitoring labor itself — requiring, for instance, that each partner periodically interrogate her own attentional