Times sure do change. Contrast with, "Why are libraries or the community park free?" where it is laughable to suggest that the users are the product. The truth

Times sure do change. Contrast with, "Why are libraries or the community park free?" where it is laughable to suggest that the users are the product. The truth was they weren't free, in a sense, but were understood as free because everybody could enjoy them. Millenials are probably the last generation to have had the opportunity to experience the old search experience: library indices. Trying to learn things at the library was a "fun" (tedious) experience with such indices, that was how research got the connotation of effort even for amateurs whereas today people view online research quite skeptically as low effort. Typically those microfiche indices or bound volumes were made on the budget of the local library, in turn funded by some tax at the local, provincial or national level. When Google began, it was often much better and faster than searching via library indices, nowadays the library index feels competitive again due to over commercial creep on Google and competitors. Millenials also witnessed the breakdown of public spaces to meet and catch up with one another. For some reason, boomer and earlier generation individuals saw youth gathering in public as a problem. Many parks starting featuring anti-loitering rules to rid them of the "nuisance" of skateboarding and hackysacks. Parks slowly stopped being a place in many communities where people would go for leisure, with some mild exceptions around basketball courts but many of those also deteriorated in many small communities. Millenials were forced to go to the mall and present a facade of consumerism in order to be acceptably seen out of the house. Again these places were often funded by taxes or local non-profits. Society is better when some things are not artificially scarce or perversely steering people towards private financial interests. Taxes are the way that we create such public goods.