I went shopping for a tablet this morning …

I went shopping for a tablet this morning and somehow ended up thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the early internet, and the increasingly porous boundary between physical and digital existence.

This is how my mind works.

The original mission was straightforward enough. I’d been considering buying an iPad mini, mainly because I wanted something smaller than my ageing iPad Pro for reading Kindle books, highlighting passages, and making notes. The Kindle itself is wonderful for reading, but its interface for annotations feels clunky compared with the Kindle app on an iPad. And, crucially, I can’t jump from a passage in a book into a conversation with ChatGPT without switching devices.

But did I really need to spend £700 on an iPad mini to accomplish that?

Once I started questioning the hardware, the whole proposition began to unravel. My iPhone already handles practically everything I do on the move. My MacBook Pro and always-on Mac mini take care of the heavier work. My intellectual archive, the Textual Underground, lives on a physical machine but is accessible through the internet. Most of my everyday digital life takes place in the cloud.

What I needed wasn’t another powerful computer. It was a comfortable little window into an environment that already existed.

So I bought a £119 Samsung tablet.

Problem solved.

Except, of course, the rhizome had other ideas.

Somewhere in the conversation, I remembered an early episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer featuring a group of computer geeks, one of whom makes an enthusiastic declaration about the internet. Something about being jacked in or becoming obsolete.

The episode is I Robot, You Jane, from 1997. The character is Fritz, and the line is:

“If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking about tablets anymore.

Or perhaps I was.

Back in 1997, the internet was still something you entered. You sat down at a computer, connected to a network, and stepped into a strange new territory called cyberspace. There was a distinct sense of crossing a threshold between the physical world and the virtual one.

Nearly thirty years later, that threshold has become considerably harder to locate.

I’m connected almost continuously. My phone travels with me. My books, notes, conversations, and creative projects move between devices. I can be walking through the Warwickshire countryside, sitting on a train, or drinking coffee in a café and still have access to my intellectual world. I can begin a conversation on one device and continue it on another without losing the thread.

The device has become less a destination than a doorway.

And yet, there’s an irony here. For all the early cyber-utopian enthusiasm about escaping the limitations of physical existence, I still find myself shopping for a particular arrangement of glass, plastic, and electronics because of how it feels in my hands.

The body hasn’t disappeared into cyberspace.

Perhaps the more interesting development isn’t that we’ve abandoned physical objects for digital ones, but that our relationship with those objects has changed. The machine is no longer necessarily where the work lives. It’s one of several interfaces through which we encounter an ongoing environment of thought, memory, and conversation.

Which brings me back to the rhizome.

I didn’t sit down this morning intending to investigate the cultural mythology of the early internet. I was comparing tablet specifications. One thought brushed against another, and a connection appeared. From screen size to cloud computing. From cloud computing to being permanently connected. From there to a half-remembered line of dialogue from a television show I watched years ago.

No outline. No predetermined destination. No obligation to remain on topic.

Just thinking in motion.

And the really interesting thing is that the detour hasn’t taken me away from my original enquiry. It’s opened another entrance into it.

There’s something wonderfully appropriate about the fact that I Robot, You Jane involves an ancient demon escaping from a book into the internet. A piece of knowledge, once confined to a physical object, is released into a network and acquires a new kind of existence.

There’s also Jenny Calendar, Buffy’s resident technopagan, occupying that curious intersection between magic, ancient knowledge, and modern technology.

I haven’t reached that episode in my current rewatch, so I’m leaving the connection here for now. There’s plenty to explore when I get there: digital disembodiment, the mythology of cyberspace, technological enchantment, the relationship between magic and information, perhaps even the question of what happens when intelligence no longer appears bound to a single physical form.

For now, this is simply a record of how the thought arrived.

I set out to buy a tablet.

I found a demon in the machine.

And somewhere along the way, the rhizome grew another branch.

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Threads to pick up when I reach Episode 8

• The early internet as a mythological frontier. Cyberspace as another realm, with its own inhabitants, dangers, promises, and rituals of entry.
• Moloch and disembodied intelligence. What does it mean for something once bound to a book to enter a network? How might that 1997 anxiety speak to our contemporary encounters with AI?
• Jenny Calendar as technopagan. The relationship between magical practice, information systems, and technologies that extend human agency.
• The persistence of embodiment. If information can move freely between devices, why does the physical form of the interface still matter so much?
• The rhizome as a thinking practice. Following associations rather than forcing thought into a predetermined structure. The wandering itself becomes a method of discovery.

Status: Open field note. Revisit after watching Buffy S01E08, “I Robot, You Jane”.