Dishing the Dirt with Daisy Alioto
Here at Lux we’re delighted to be collaborating with Dirt, which founder Daisy Alioto described to me as “interpreter of two sides of our culture right now, artists and technologists.” We have some writers in common (check out Lux fave Michelle Santiago Cortes over there) and a common interest in the deep weirdness of work in 2025. We decided to collaborate on an essay contest for the best piece of (unpublished) cultural criticism about work. Reader, submit!
The Dirt project has always been intertwined with new technology, taking early funding in crypto, developing an app to serve small publishers, and building a fast-paced landing page for tech news in collaboration with creative agency Boys Club. Daisy says the publication embraces wide-ranging experiments because “trying more things increases the odds that you figure out what could work.” With spinoffs on everything from tennis to design, this quality makes Dirt very fun to read. I interviewed Daisy over Zoom about what drives the Dirt project.
SARAH LEONARD I wanted to start by asking if you could frame Dirt for us in your own words. Lux comes out with a super explicit political orientation; you guys are taking a more cultural approach.
DAISY ALIOTO Any time you point to something and say “pay attention to that,” it is in a sense a political statement. All culture is political. All technology is political.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a sign of helplessness or resignation that there hasn’t been the same sort of pivot to resistance content among publications and publishers in the second term. I’ve made my political point of view very clear, but I’m not going to take a publication about books and tennis and suddenly make it a publication about how Trump is bad. The more you produce culture to resist something rather than to create something, the more you reinforce the primacy of his perspective and the administration’s perspective. So I feel like the best thing I can do in this moment is to support the writers and the creative work that we already support while remaining very clear about what our values are.
I channel a lot of my organizing work into the National Writers Union, and I’m on the board of a new legal aid fund that we established to take over from the nonprofit service arm of the union. So that’s where I do a lot of my volunteering and political work. I do think it carries over in how I work with our freelancers.
SL Tell me about a signature Dirt piece.
DA “Bad Waitress” is still our most popular article ever. Part of it is that Becca Schuh’s an amazing writer, but it’s also that she really hit on something about the relationship between creative workers and service workers that nobody had said in this exact way before. When there’s a conversation about the gig economy, people say “well, I always tip and I always treat these people well,” but implicit underneath that is a “God forbid I ever take that job” type feeling.
I was up last night reading Twitter and this tweet came across my timeline — it was somebody saying “I have a humanities degree and I can’t even get responses from restaurants and bars because I’m overqualified.” And somebody else was like “actually, you’re underqualified.” To work in a restaurant or bar has its own skillset and requirements. If you can’t get a job in academia — which is a whole other can of worms — the fact that you even think it could be a fallback to “just be a waitress” or “just be a waiter” shows your ignorance about what this type of labor entails, who does it, and why. It’s not that you’re not getting a callback because you have a PhD on your resume, it’s because you don’t have restaurant experience. I think Becca does such an elegant and funny job at poking holes in that fallacy, which is contextualized by her very real experience.
SL I know keeping a new media organization moving is also quite a job, and we’re in a really difficult climate for media.
DA You know, what we think of as the golden age of digital media, like the BuzzFeed period — those companies were growing a lot, but they were falsely subsidized by venture capital. It’s not that Jonah Peretti is smarter than you or me. We’re actually operating in the real economy now; the real economy of the internet is finally visible and we can actually see what works and what’s sustainable. I think you have to be delusionally optimistic to start a publication or really any small business. Dirt has made me appreciate every coffee shop, anybody running a business, because this is my first experience truly creating something from nothing and then trying to put a value on it. I think that’s actually a really good experience for somebody who’s interested in leftist politics to have for the same reason that you listen to the Financial Times every morning. [ED: true, listen to our interview over at Dirt!] I also do enjoy the intellectual puzzle of it.