At the height of the Belle Époque, the Art Nouveau movement pushed back against industrial sameness with unapologetic beauty. As AI ushers in a new age of effortless production, that same tension between efficiency and aesthetics is beginning to surface again.

The little convenience centre close to my house – the one that I go to most often to do my shopping – is currently in the process of retiling its floors.

While I can understand why this is a necessary thing (the contrast between the few remaining old tiles and the new ones makes it clear just how worn and weathered the old ones really are), I can’t say that I am thrilled with the design choices that have been made here. For one thing, the retiling project required the removal of a lovely little water feature which (sadly) does not appear to be making a return. For another, the new tiles that have been installed are not just uninspiring: they are mindnumbingly, achingly plain. Almost offensively so.

I know I sound like a cranky old lady when I say this, and I promise that I still understand the logic behind these decisions. It all comes down to costs, right? Removing the water feature probably saves the centre a little bit of maintenance money every month, plus it frees up space for more vendors. Choosing a plain (boring), durable tile over something interesting or patterned is more cost-effective. With the economy where it is, now is probably not the moment to roll out the marble and mosaics.

I get it. But it does make me wonder: is late-stage capitalism responsible for making the world uglier?

A world without scarcity

A while ago, I read a short story called The Midas Plague, which was written by a man named Frederick Pohl way back in 1954. In this story, the author imagines a semi-utopian future world where energy is cheap and everything humanity needs is made in extravagant quantities by robots. With no labour to keep them busy, the humans in Pohl’s story occupy themselves mainly with consumption.

The Midas Plague is a brilliant illustration of what is known as a post-scarcity society. This is a theoretical economic situation where most of the goods we need can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labour. Since human labour is an expensive ingredient, removing it from the equation results in these goods being made available either very cheaply or freely. The defining feature of a post-scarcity society is that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met, along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.

For all the naysayers who believe that artificial intelligence will lead humanity down a path of destruction and ruin, there is a slightly more optimistic group of thinkers that reckons AI could help us to take our first steps towards realising a post-scarcity society. While I acknowledge that I’m simplifying things quite a bit here (necessarily so, otherwise I’d be writing a novel), the concept of an AI-powered post-scarcity society where labour is optional and the standard of living is high is a fun thought experiment to play around with. And because I still can’t stop thinking about those dull shopping centre tiles, I’m preoccupied with what that kind of future would look like.

The golden age

Luckily, I don’t have to wonder about the design choices of a hypothetical utopian future. Not when history has already illustrated it in full colour.

There was a brief period in European history when the world thought it was close to achieving this. It’s known as La Belle Époque, or “the beautiful era”. From around 1871 to 1914, much of Western Europe experienced a stretch of relative peace that coincided with a wave of technological progress that must have felt, at the time, quite dizzying. Steel, chemicals, petroleum and electricity were all invented in a relatively short window of time. These advances reshaped entire systems of production and daily life. Welcome to the Second Industrial Revolution.

Goods became cheaper and easier to produce, cities expanded and modernised, and more people found themselves able to afford things that had previously been out of reach. Wages rose and standards of living improved to the point that people got used to the idea of having leisure time. There was, if not a universal sense of optimism, then at least a growing belief that society was moving in the right direction.

Knowing what we know now – that World War 1 was on its way, in 1914 – it is difficult not to read into all this optimism with a certain amount of caution. Still, to people living through La Belle Époque, there must have been a sense of positive momentum, or the feeling that a series of problems was being steadily and sensibly solved.

The downside of industrialisation

Still, progress rarely arrives without trade-offs, and one of the important shifts during this period had less to do with what was being made and more to do with how it was being made.

Industrialisation meant that production of all sorts of things moved from individual craftsmen to factories, which meant that objects that had once been shaped by hand quickly became standardised. Designs were repeated, ornament was simplified or removed, and in many cases, new products were less acts of invention than efficient approximations of older styles. None of this was especially controversial, because it all made perfect economic sense. If something can be produced faster and at a lower cost, there are very few incentives not to do so.

(Is anyone else getting a feeling of AI-deja vu, or is it just me?)

It was in the wake of this sweeping industrialisation that a group of artists and designers across Europe began to push back against the status quo.

The beautiful everyday

The result of this pushback was a visual movement known as Art Nouveau, which had its prime between 1890 and 1910.

Art Nouveau was essentially a blurring of the line between art and functional design. One of the movement’s key concerns was to confront the established hierarchy of fine art over applied art. This was done by intentionally giving prestige back to craftsmanship, rejecting ‘standard’ designs, and by designing everyday objects as if they were works of art.

So what did this look like? Lines that used to be straight and easily replicable suddenly curved and twisted into organic shapes, surfaces filled with patterns drawn from nature, and objects that had previously been treated as purely functional were approached with a new level of care and intention. A bus stop could carry the same visual weight as a sculpture, a poster for cigarettes could be designed as thoughtfully as a painting, and a staircase in a building could feel as though it had grown into its surroundings rather than been assembled from a set of interchangeable parts. There is in much of Art Nouveau a kind of deliberate excess, an unwillingness to settle for the merely adequate, and a dedication to using rare materials as if they were commonplace. If there was ever a movement that captured humanity’s desire to be surrounded by beauty, it was this one.

Sadly, this kind of excess couldn’t last. By 1911, global sentiments were already shifting towards the negative, and by the advent of World War 1 in 1914, the Nouveau bubble had burst. Time, energy and money that had been poured into making beautiful things was quickly redirected into war efforts. The rest, as they say, is history.

Is the next “beautiful era” waiting in the wings?

It is difficult not to see echoes of this pattern in the present moment, particularly in relation to AI. If the Second Industrial Revolution transformed how we produced physical goods, AI appears to be reshaping how we complete tasks – the kinds of things that, until recently, required a combination of time, effort, and specialised skill. Increasingly, these can be generated quickly, at low cost, and at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine even a few years ago.

If previous cycles are anything to go by, the response to this newfound ease of production will not be a wholesale rejection of new technologies, but a gradual rebalancing. As certain forms of production become easier and more widespread, other attributes tend to gain importance: the visible investment of time, the sense of intentionality, the little irregularities that signal human involvement. These are not new values, but they tend to become more noticeable when they are no longer ubiquitous.

All of this suggests that it is at least possible that we are approaching the conditions for something resembling another “beautiful era,” even if it does not take the same form as the Belle Époque. History suggests that when people have the means to do so, they do not simply settle for adequacy; they experiment, embellish, and, at times, push things to excess. The result is not always consistent, but it can produce periods of remarkable creativity and visual richness.

Maybe in a decade, the little centre near my home will retile its floors again. Could it be possible that when that time comes, a different sensibility will inform the choice of tiles? Will we be at a point once more where the aesthetic qualities of our surroundings matter more to us than their cost?

This artist remains optimistic.

About the author: Dominique Olivier

Dominique Olivier is the founder of human.writer, where she uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.

Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.

She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.

Dominique can be reached on LinkedIn here.