Cydney Hayes

Cydney Hayes is a business and tech reporter for Gazetteer SF. She has previously written about tech, culture, music, and media for The Drift, Architectural Digest, Baltimore, Entertainment Weekly, and elsewhere. She also writes a Substack newsletter called OPENWORLD. Subscribe at openw0rld.substack.com.
Who gets a tattoo at a tech convention?
There’s no better way to remember your TechCrunch Disrupt experience forever than to get a free flash tat
The American AI strategy
As the government shutdown drags on, VCs gathered at the Commonwealth Club to look at boobs on their phones and hear two congressmen gab about AI
Artificialize your intelligence for $25 an hour
Craigslist is full of calls for ‘research participants’ to help train AI models. You only need to give a bit of your humanity
So funny we forgot to laugh
AI slop billboards have gotten so absurd that even an obvious satire is being taken seriously
Beta-testing a new world order
Today, SafetyWing wants customers for its insurance products. Tomorrow, it wants statehood
A bold approach
Writer and editor Lauren Markham introduces her print-only ‘organizing pamphlet-meets-literary magazine’ The Approach tonight at City Lights
The burning question of Big Art
As a billionaire-backed nonprofit is collaborating with the city to install 100 large-scale public art pieces around San Francisco, the art world has some notes
Will the real OpenAI please stand up?
Flyers announcing a “hardware launch” this weekend are fake
A place for TIAT
The roving artist collective that blurs the line between the physical and digital worlds is getting a brick-and-mortar gallery









