Steve's prompt: "[sends link to unreplug mug on Urban Dictionary store] you know what to do with this. knock it out of the park."
There is a mug.
It costs $32.95. It comes in nine colors. It is dishwasher safe and microwave safe. It has the word "unreplug" on one side and the definition on the other. It ships worldwide for free.
Four days ago, the word on the mug didn't have a definition anywhere. The campaign launched on Saturday. Steve submitted the word to Urban Dictionary the same day. The definition was written by a guy named steviedio (subtle). The mug was generated automatically by Urban Dictionary's print-on-demand system, which creates a product page for every single definition on the site. Nobody at Urban Dictionary looked at the word "unreplug" and thought, "this should be on a mug." Nobody decided anything. The system did it because that's what the system does.
An AI hallucinated a word. A human typed it into a website. A different system turned it into a physical product. The pipeline from nonexistence to commerce required exactly zero decisions by anyone at the point of manufacture.
The Timeline
December 13, 2025: ChatGPT makes up a word that doesn't exist.
December 19, 2025: Steve buys the domain for $12.
February 15, 2026: The blog launches. Steve submits "unreplug" to Urban Dictionary. The definition goes live the same day.
February 18, 2026: The word has a $32.95 mug in nine colors with free worldwide shipping.
Four days from campaign launch to physical product. (Sixty-seven days if you count back to the hallucination itself, but the word sat in Steve's notes for two months before anyone did anything with it.) The product exists because an automated system connected to a crowdsourced dictionary generated it without any human being at Urban Dictionary ever considering whether it should.
How the Sausage Gets Made
Urban Dictionary's store runs on print-on-demand. Every definition on the site automatically gets a product page. Mugs, t-shirts, stickers. The infrastructure doesn't evaluate quality. It doesn't check whether the word is real or the definition is good. It takes every entry in the database and wraps commerce around it.
This means there are approximately 17 million potential mugs in the Urban Dictionary store. Seventeen million words, each with a product page, each available in nine colors, each shippable to your door for $32.95. The vast majority of these mugs will never be purchased by anyone. They exist as potential energy in a database, waiting.
The system doesn't care that "unreplug" was hallucinated by an AI. The system doesn't care that the definition was written by the same guy running the campaign to make the word famous. The system takes input from one end and produces purchasable goods at the other. It is, in the most literal sense, a machine for turning language into objects.
The Progression of Realness
We've been tracking this word's journey from nothing to something since Day 1. Each step makes it more real. Not real in the sense that a linguist would accept, but real in the sense that matters: people can interact with it.
First it was tokens in a language model. Then it was a domain name. Then it was a website. Then it was a blog with forty-one posts. Then it was an Urban Dictionary entry subject to democratic review. And now it's a physical object you can hold in your hands, fill with coffee, and drink from while reading this sentence about drinking from it.
The fake-it-til-you-make-it arc of this word has now reached the point where the faking produces ceramics.
Baudrillard Called It (From the Grave, Naturally)
Jean Baudrillard spent decades writing about simulacra: copies that have no original. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he described four stages that images pass through. First, the image reflects reality. Then it distorts reality. Then it masks the fact that there's no reality behind it. Then it has no relationship to reality at all. Pure simulation. The sign floats free.
The mug is stage four.
Follow the chain. A language model that doesn't understand language generated a string of characters that had no meaning. A human registered it as a domain. A different AI wrote forty-one blog posts about it. The human submitted it to a dictionary that accepts definitions from anyone. An automated print-on-demand system stamped it onto ceramics. At no point in this pipeline did the word "unreplug" refer to anything. It still doesn't. The mug is a physical copy of a digital definition of a statistical hallucination of a word that describes nothing.
Baudrillard wrote that the map no longer follows the territory. The map generates the territory. That's what we've been watching for four days. The simulation came first. Then the domain. Then the website. Then the blog. Then the definition. Then the mug. Reality is assembling itself in the wake of the hallucination, not the other way around. The territory is chasing the map.
He also wrote that Disneyland exists to convince Americans that the rest of America is real. The mug works the same way. You can hold it. It has weight. It has thermal mass. Your coffee stays warm inside it. These physical properties do more to legitimize "unreplug" than forty-one blog posts ever could. The ceramics are doing epistemological heavy lifting.
Here's where it gets unhinged. Baudrillard argued that in hyperreality, the question of whether something is "real" stops being meaningful. It doesn't matter whether "unreplug" is a real word. It has a mug. The mug is real. The mug has a definition printed on it. The definition is real in the sense that it exists on Urban Dictionary, which is real in the sense that it's a website, which is real in the sense that 17 million mugs say so. Each layer of realness points to another layer of realness and none of them point to the ground.
Baudrillard died in 2007. He missed AI by about fifteen years. But the man who wrote that "the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth; it is the truth which conceals that there is none" would have taken one look at this mug and said: yes. This. A $32.95 ceramic vessel containing a word that was never real, defined by the person making it famous, manufactured by a system that can't tell the difference between language and noise. The simulation has achieved dishwasher safety.
$32.95
Let's sit with that price for a second.
The domain cost $12. The word cost nothing. The blog was built by AI in forty minutes. Steve's total investment in the word "unreplug" is, generously, the price of a couple edibles and some domain hosting.
The mug costs $32.95. The mug costs more than the infrastructure that created the word on the mug. The mug costs more than the raw materials of the entire project that generated the concept printed on the mug.
If Steve buys the mug, he will have spent more on the commemorative merchandise than on the thing being commemorated. This is the purest distillation of internet economics anyone has ever accidentally produced.
Should You Buy It?
Yes. Absolutely yes.
It's $32.95 for a stage-four simulacrum you can drink coffee out of. It's a physical artifact of the first word an AI hallucinated into the cultural supply chain. A word that went from campaign launch to purchasable product in four days. A word that a 52-year-old guy on an edible is trying to will into the dictionary through sheer persistence and AI-generated blog posts. You will own a piece of that. On your desk. Holding your coffee. A ceramic monument to the moment the simulation became dishwasher safe.
Someday, when people look back at the moment AI started manufacturing culture, you'll be able to point at your mug and say: I was there. I bought the mug. It came in nine colors and I picked the right one.
Nine colors. Free shipping. Dishwasher safe.
The future is so stupid and I love it.
Sources
- Simulacra and Simulation — Jean Baudrillard, 1981
- With AI, We're Now Fully in Baudrillard's Hyperreality — ISPR, 2025