Rachel Tay is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Literature. In general, her research spans the intersections of cybernetics, media theory and aesthetics, as well as the philosophies of mind, embodiment, and cognition. In particular, it pursues a longue durée history of three recurring structures of distraction pervasive throughout contemporary culture and discourses on media technologies — streams, and similitudes —in order to probe the dynamics and politics latent in these quotidian figures of distraction. Her work has been published in Post45 Contemporaries and is forthcoming in Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II.