Metalabel’s second annual Anonymous Creative Futures survey just dropped, and it reads like a dispatch from the creative frontlines. Over 300 artists and creative workers across disciplines and geographies were promised anonymity and asked to be brutally honest about what it means to make art right now. The result is a portrait of creative practice at a moment of profound transformation, and profound anxiety.
The timing feels urgent. We’re watching the creative class navigate a perfect storm: AI automation threatening to hollow out creative labor, platform decay making digital spaces increasingly hostile, economic precarity reaching new heights, and a political landscape that ranges from indifferent to actively hostile to cultural production. And yet, the survey’s final theme—its seventh and perhaps most essential insight, is simply this: Doing It Anyway.
For those of us working in Orange County’s arts ecosystem, this report offers both mirror and map. Let me walk through the seven major themes and what they might mean for artists here.
1. AI, Automation & The Question of Humanness
The survey reveals a creative class split almost exactly down the middle on whether AI will change what they make (50/50) and how they make it (44% yes). But the anxiety isn’t really about the technology, it’s about what one respondent called “being automated out of our own creativity.”
The fear is displacement, particularly at the entry level. Multiple respondents worry that “AI has wiped out the entry-level jobs that used to be the stepping stones for learning new skills.” For emerging artists in OC, where institutional pathways are already limited, this compounds an existing challenge.
But resistance is emerging too. Artists talk about leaning into “imperfect absurdism,” making “evident human made flaws” a feature rather than a bug. One response that struck me: “handmade as anti-ai ‘proof of effort’ will continue to be explored. Effort and time spent will grow as a metric of value.”
OC Context: We’ve never had strong institutional infrastructure for nurturing emerging artists, which means we’ve always had to create our own pathways. The AI displacement of entry-level creative work makes this DIY ethos less choice than necessity. But it also positions OC artists, already practiced at working outside traditional systems, to lead in developing alternative models of creative development.
2. The Dark Forest & Private Spaces
“Public internet becoming more slum-like while more good things move into dark forests.”
This theme captures what’s happening as artists retreat from increasingly hostile public platforms into private, protected spaces. The survey shows something counterintuitive: artists planning to share less online are split on whether they’ll feel more isolated (37%) or more connected (34%). Meanwhile, those sharing more online expect increased connection (70%).
What’s emerging isn’t simply a retreat from digital spaces, but a migration toward different kinds of digital spaces, Discord servers, private websites, closed networks, what some call “DarkforestOS.” As one respondent put it: “The last era of the internet was wide and loud and this next one is deep and resonant.”
OC Context: This trend should resonate here. Orange County has always been a “dark forest” relative to LA, less visible, less on the map, operating in its own ecosystem. The question is whether we lean into this quality or resist it. Perhaps our geographic marginality becomes an asset as artists everywhere seek spaces that operate outside the attention economy’s brutal logic.
3. The Return to IRL / Analog / Tangible
The word “human” appears 50 times in respondents’ visions of the future. “Community” appears 26 times. “Real” appears 24 times.
Artists are talking about “time with friends, zines, more live concerts,” about “events, radio, community care, performances, as a direct response to the online disconnect.” The tangible, the embodied, the unreproducible, these become sites of value and resistance.
One respondent: “Everyone is ready to emerge into reality.”
OC Context: This is perhaps the biggest opportunity for Orange County artists right now. We have space, literal, physical space, in ways that LA doesn’t. We have communities forming around DIY venues, artist-run spaces, experimental performance. The challenge is infrastructure and sustainability, but the desire is clearly there. How do we build gathering spaces that can persist?
4. Economic Precarity & The Business of Creativity
Nearly half of respondents (48.9%) expect to feel less financially secure in 2026. Only 17.2% expect to feel more secure.
The desperation in some responses is palpable: “I’ve had three years where I’ve worked full-time, but rarely actually got paid… I don’t know how long I can keep this up.” Another: “The perceivable equations for maintaining a life increasingly do not add up.”
But there’s also clear-eyed pragmatism emerging. Multiple respondents talked about “the importance of understanding business as a creative person.” One noted that “the leftist who can embrace financial practicalities and professionalism while trying to live their values and make art they are proud of are the ones who will protect their focus enough to produce at scale.”
OC Context: The median wage for arts and design workers nationally is $52,000, almost exactly what it costs to rent a one-bedroom apartment in NYC for a year. In Orange County, where housing costs rival or exceed New York, the economics are even more brutal. The question isn’t whether OC artists face financial precarity, we do, but how we respond to it. The survey respondents who mentioned “Artist Corporations and the development of them as a powerful tool that creatives can use to claim their power” are onto something. We need new legal structures, new business models, new ways of organizing creative labor that aren’t premised on individual heroics.
5. Political Instability as Background Hum
Half of respondents mentioned something political. The words that appeared most: capitalism (22 mentions), climate (18), fascism (15), war (11), freedom (9), resistance (8).
One respondent: “Look around gestures arm broadly“
Another: “Fascism is here. They will only make it harder for creative voices to flourish. We’re going to have to take our markets underground.”
What strikes me is how this appears as “background hum” a constant ambient anxiety rather than the foreground subject. Artists are making work despite and through political chaos, but they’re doing it with one eye always scanning the horizon for what’s coming next.
OC Context: Orange County’s political complexity, its reputation as conservative territory increasingly complicated by demographic shifts and pockets of progressive organizing, means local artists are already practiced at navigating political tension. The question is how this navigational skill becomes a resource rather than just a survival strategy. What does it mean to make art in a place that doesn’t have a clear political identity, where you can’t assume your audience’s politics?
6. Community, Connection & Finding Your People
Here’s the surprise: despite everything, the platform decay, the economic anxiety, the political instability, 47.7% of respondents expect to feel more connected to other creative people in 2026. Only 22.1% expect to feel more isolated.
The quotes here are striking in their hopefulness:
- “finding my people, and having control over my time”
- “There are more cool people than there have been in a long time”
- “The ppl crave collectivism!”
Multiple respondents talked about “working with others,” “doing group work,” “living together at the end of the world.”
OC Context: This is where Orange County’s arts scene is actually thriving. The formations happening, the DIY spaces, the artist collectives, the informal networks, these are precisely the “niche communities” and “local scenes” the survey respondents are excited about. The challenge is making these formations durable, giving them the resources and infrastructure to persist beyond individual enthusiasm.
7. Doing It Anyway
“The spark I see in some to just keep doing what they do, even when the world doesn’t seem to want or support it. Humanity will always prevail.”
This final theme isn’t resignation, it’s defiance. It’s the recognition that making art is not contingent on favorable conditions. It happens in the cracks, through difficulty, despite everything.
One respondent: “What makes me excited is when I see creative expression grow through the crack of difficult times, it is an affirmation of life.”
Another: “We are in the storm before sunrise. Eventually, being a creative person will be the only way to live, but right now its value is hard to prove.”
The survey title,”Doing It Anyway” captures this perfectly. Not doing it because conditions are favorable, but doing it because the alternative is unthinkable.
OC Context: If there’s a through-line in Orange County’s creative history, it’s this exact quality. Artists have been making work here despite the lack of major institutions, despite limited media attention, despite a cultural infrastructure that’s always been more fragmented than cohesive. “Doing it anyway” isn’t new to us, it’s how we’ve always operated.
What This Means: A Scenario for OC
Let me try to synthesize these themes into a scenario for Orange County’s creative future, drawing on the survey’s insights:
The Emerging Landscape (2026-2028)
As platform decay accelerates and AI automation displaces entry-level creative work, OC artists increasingly organize around physical spaces and IRL experiences. The county’s relative affordability compared to LA (still expensive, but relatively more accessible) attracts artists seeking space to gather, experiment, and build alternative infrastructure.
What emerges is a network of “dark forest” formations, artist-run spaces, cooperative studios, experimental venues, that operate semi-publicly. They’re visible enough to build community but protected enough to maintain autonomy. Think of it as archipelago geography: connected islands with clear identity but not dependent on centralized infrastructure.
These formations prioritize:
- Handmade/human-scale work as resistance to AI-generated “slop”
- Time-based and embodied practices that can’t be automated
- Collective ownership models that distribute risk and resource
- Skill-sharing and mentorship that replace lost institutional pathways
- Cross-disciplinary collaboration that makes work economically and creatively sustainable
The political instability remains background hum, but artists develop practices of making work that doesn’t require political permission or institutional validation. The work becomes more local, more specific, more rooted in particular communities and concerns.
Financial precarity persists, but new models emerge: artists organize as corporations, pool resources, develop alternative revenue streams that aren’t dependent on traditional arts funding. The question shifts from “How do I sustain my individual practice?” to “How do we sustain our collective capacity to make work?”
Counter-Defuturing as Practice
In my work around futures thinking, I often use the concept of “defuturing” the systematic elimination of future-making capacity. What the survey reveals is artists engaged in what we might call “counter-defuturing practices”: actively creating conditions for future-making despite systems designed to foreclose it.
When artists talk about “doing it anyway,” about making work “through the cracks,” about “working together at the end of the world,” they’re describing practices that generate possibility where official narratives see only constraint.
For Orange County artists, this means:
- Don’t wait for permission or infrastructure. Build it. The formations happening now, the spaces, the networks, the experiments, these are the infrastructure.
- Prioritize durability over visibility. Dark forest strategies work. Not everything needs to be public-facing or scalable. Some of the most important work happens in protected, niche spaces.
- Organize collectively. Individual creative heroics are increasingly unsustainable. The future belongs to those who can build and sustain collective forms of practice.
- Embrace the handmade, the embodied, the unreproducible. These become sites of value and meaning in an increasingly automated landscape.
- Take the long view. As one respondent noted: “We are in the storm before sunrise.” What we’re building now may not show its full value for years. Build anyway.
The Question
The survey’s data is stark. The challenges are real. The anxiety is justified. But what strikes me most is the persistence, the artists who, despite everything, are still finding ways to make work, build community, create possibility.
So here’s my question for Orange County artists: How do we turn our marginality into an asset? How do we build infrastructure that persists? And how do we do it anyway, together?
The full survey is available at acorp.dfos.com. I highly recommend reading through the actual responses—they’re raw, honest, and deeply revealing about this moment we’re in.
Chris Hoff writes about Orange County’s arts landscape for the OC Art Blog and works as a cultural architect helping people and organizations navigate transition and design emergent futures.
