The Mall Turns Off the Power at 3pm

Thoughts from the TUANZ Tech Users Summit 2026

When collecting the evidence for the new Te Rourou One Foundation Connected Rangatahi: Digital Inclusion in the Age of AI report, a young person told the researchers that their local mall “just shuts their things off, their charging ports off, they just turn off after a certain hour.”

I want to be fair to the mall. I’m sure somebody, somewhere, held a meeting about this. Somebody raised a concern about loitering, and somebody else said they could just cut the power to the outlets at certain hours, and everyone nodded because it seemed tidy. Nobody in that meeting thought of themselves as making a digital exclusion policy. But that’s what they were doing. We write lofty strategy documents for digital inclusion. Digital exclusion doesn’t need any. It gets made in a thousand small decisions by people who don’t know they’re making them.*

The research was led by Te Rourou One Foundation with One NZ and the Brainbox Institute, and presented at the summit by Shaz Reece, Te Rourou’s Insights Lead. Youth workers held conversations with young people aged 16 to 24, people they already knew. The method matters. A trusted conversation can get past the answers people think they’re supposed to give. Sometimes it gets you to the mall.

According to the research, the message from young people was that “technology is no longer a luxury”. Which is absolutely true but is also a sentence so played out that it’s completely ignored. So let me put it like this. If your phone dies, you don’t miss a message. You miss a job interview, a flat viewing or the ability to do your homework. 

The barriers are boring, which is the problem. Mobile data is expensive. Coverage is patchy. Phone or laptop repairs cost money. None of it screams crisis, so it’s not treated like one. Young people described losing work and study opportunities this way, very quietly.

And they cope, kind of. Rangatahi can list every business in town with free Wi-Fi. Shaz was clear that this isn’t the win it looks like: “we shouldn’t be relying on that resourcefulness to make up for systems that are not working for them.” A case for that might be that if our government wants students at school on time, perhaps the fact our young people need a mental map of the city’s Wi-Fi, just to check what time the bus is coming, is an issue?

But we already knew all of this. In 2018, the foundation backed research called Out of the Maze, which found many of the same barriers. Tom Barraclough, Co-Founder and Director of the Brainbox Institute, noted that sometimes the most useful finding is the lack of change: “Hey, look, nothing has changed. We told you about this, and nothing’s changed.”

To me, this is WAY more interesting than a new finding. The same barriers were documented 8 years ago, and they’re still here. At some point, failing to fix a known problem becomes a decision.

Meanwhile, the economy is doing what economies do. ANZ Chief Economist Sharon Zollner noted that youth unemployment has risen well above average. She also wondered aloud how quickly it will fall, given what AI might be doing to the kind of entry-level work young people used to start with. So the jobs are harder to find, and the tool you need to find them costs money you might not have. 

The Hon Penny Simmonds, Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology, told the summit audience that “Trust is really at the centre of a successful digital future.” I don’t think anyone in the room disagreed with the sentiment, but let’s tie it back to the evidence of the day.

Young people told the Te Rourou researchers they no longer trust what they see online. Some said it was ‘safer to assume everything was AI or a scam of some sort’.

Let’s just give that a moment. For most of photography’s history, the assumption was that the thing in the photograph had, at least, happened. Shaz mentioned the old meme of an AI-generated Will Smith eating spaghetti, which was once funny precisely because it was so obviously fake. It isn’t obviously fake anymore. So Gen Z are arriving at adulthood with the opposite default settings from their parents. Not ‘this is real unless proven otherwise’ but ‘this is fake unless proven otherwise’.

Wenzel Huettner, CTO and Founder of cybersecurity firm DEFEND, has a word for what they’re up against: truthiness. “They don’t have to convince you that it’s real,” he said. “They have to just convince you to the point that it seeds doubt in your mind.” Assuming everything is fake is probably the smarter option. It’s also seriously exhausting.

At a summit full of cybersecurity people, the common advice from the stage was to verify everything yourself. Which is reasonable, in the way that telling people to read the terms and conditions is reasonable. Tom suggested building it into the products, “taking the effort off the individual”. Smart. 

It’s tempting to assume young people have all of this sorted, because they grew up with it. Growing up inside something doesn’t mean you understand it. Most of us grew up inside an economy, for example.

On a different panel, Claire Amos, Principal of Albany Senior High School, said: ‘Digital divide is increasingly about opportunity and not simply access.’ Yep, agreed. Though access is still at the mall. Opportunity is what happens after the power comes back on.

The best part of the Te Rourou research isn’t a particular finding. It’s the message that young people WANT IN. They have solutions, from better public Wi-Fi to safer platforms, and they understand the problems because they live inside them every day. “If young people are expected to live so much of their lives in this digital world, they should have a meaningful say in what that world looks like”, Shaz noted. 

Which raises the obvious question. If the people closest to the problem keep being right, and we keep being surprised by it, who exactly isn’t listening?

Ngā mihi to TUANZ for hosting the Tech Users Summit, and congratulations on 40 years. Thanks also to Shaz Reece, Tom Barraclough, Claire Amos, Sharon Zollner, Wenzel Huettner and all the speakers who gave us plenty to chew on.

You can read the full Connected Rangatahi report from Te Rourou One Foundation in our resource kete. 

*I’m assuming good faith here. It’s possible the mall simply hates teenagers. But I’ve found that most bad outcomes come from tidy meetings, not supervillains.