“The phrase “user-generated content” (UGC) acquired its bureaucratic weight in the mid-2000s, after years of people doing the activity first and policy arriving later. The OECD report that canonized the term treated it as a supply condition: content made publicly available, containing some creative effort, produced outside professional routines. UGC required governance. Publication implies distribution. Creative effort implies variability and conflict about what counts as “good” or “allowed.” Production outside professional routines implies that the prior institutional scaffolding of accountability and competence is absent, or arrives late, or arrives indirectly through platforms, norms, and enforcement. The most important sentence in that report is not the definition itself, but the surrounding acknowledgment that the category has no fixed border and evolves as monetization, professionalism, and platform incentives blur the old line between “user” and “producer.” This primary claim of this essay is: User-generated software names a structural shift in how software enters the world: from authored artifacts produced under professional scarcity to moderated streams produced under generative abundance.” https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/user-generated-software-is-user-generated