timeline for making profit: Investors will need an indication of when they expect some return on their investment so you need to provide some reasonable timelines of when that will be

Lefebvre first notes the extent to which technology and mass production have altered everyday life in the US and Europe since World War II. As an example, he quotes an article from L’Express [a weekly news magazine similar to Time in the U.S.], which describes the latest kitchen conveniences, described by the magazine as “requirements” and “needs.”

Indisputably the last few years have witnessed the application of the most modern of techniques to the way everyday life is organized, that is to say, to a sector which up until now has been paid scant attention. The way in which everyday life lags behind what is technically possible is and should be one of the themes of the Critique of Everyday Life. How could this theme possibly have lost its foundation or its meaning?

In L'Express of 8 June 1956 (p. 21) the following information was given on the “interesting novelties” which its special New York correspondent had noticed, and which “will inevitably end up coming to France”:

Kitchens are becoming less like kitchens and more like works of art ... The latest technique is the electronic oven ... The intercom (a system of loudspeakers linking every room) is becoming a standard piece of equipment in the home, while everyone is talking about a personalized little television network which will enable the lady of the house to attend to her chores while keeping an eye on the children playing in another room or in the garden ... The remarkable ubiquity of 'do it itself' [sic], the latest craze for the American husband ... includes all the household gadgets that go with it ... the latest development in the household industry? Swimming pools, which the manufacturers say they are about to mass-market ... Popular requirements as far as houses are concerned: at least seven rooms, with two bathrooms...

In the next column, “Madame Express” informs anyone who was unaware of it that:

a woman needs cast-iron will-power to stop her hairdresser from cutting her hair short. Nothing is more persuasive than a hairdresser who has made his mind up. And they have some powerful allies: cover-girls, actresses, all the women for whom money is no problem and whose pictures, distributed every day, are more persuasive than any words could be...

Lefebvre next compares this vision of the “ideal home” to the reality of those who live in “squalid slums.” He describes this desire for the latest consumer products as “a new social need,” one that is “satisfied to the detriment of another”: in other words, he brings up the question of what other kinds of social needs are being obscured or marginalized by these consumer “needs.”

The remarkable way in which modern techniques have penetrated everyday life has thus introduced into this backward sector the uneven development which characterizes every aspect of our era. Manifestations of the brilliant advances in the “ideal home” constitute sociological facts of the first importance, but they must not be allowed to conceal the contradictory character of the real social process beneath an accumulation of technological detail. These advances, along with their consequences, are provoking new structural conflicts within the concrete life of society. The same period which has witnessed a breathtaking development in the application of techniques of everyday life has also witnessed the no less breathtaking degradation of everyday life for masses of human beings. All around us, in France, in Paris itself, there are hundreds of thousands of children, youngsters, students, young couples, single people, families, living in conditions undreamed of by anyone who does not bring a sociologist's interest to bear: furnished rooms (increasingly expensive and squalid), slums, overcrowded flats, attic rooms, etc.

The deterioration of the conditions of existence is spreading to a great many French rural areas (notably in the southern half of the country), to a large proportion of craftsmen, small shopkeepers and the working class.

Agreed, it is not unusual to find peasants owning electric cookers, but the houses they live in are still dilapidated; they manage to buy gadgets, but cannot afford to repair their houses, and even less to modernize their farms. In other words, the latter are given up for the sake of the former. In the same way quite a large number of working class couples have a washing machine, a television set, or a car, but they have generally sacrificed something else for these gadgets (having a baby, for example). In this way problems of choosing what to buy—or problems associated with hire-purchase, etc.—are posed within working-class families, and these problems modify everyday life. That relatively poor peasants, or workers, should buy television sets proves the existence of a new social need. The fact is remarkable. But it does not tell us the size or the extent of this need, nor the extent to which it is satisfied. Nor does it prove that this need has not been satisfied to the detriment of another.

Finally, Lefebvre contends that “technicity” [technical gadgets and consumer products] have replaced “dreams, or ideas, or poetry” as metaphors for our lives and our aspirations. He also relates this to the mass media, particularly the movie industry, which portrays and makes universal the “escape into this illusory but present everyday world.”

Far from suppressing criticism of everyday life, modern technical progress realizes it. This technicity replaces the criticism of life through dreams, or ideas, or poetry, or those activities which rise above the everyday, by the critique of everyday life from within: the critique everyday life makes of itself, the critique of the real by the possible and of one aspect of life by another. Compared with lower or degraded standards of living, everyday life with all the superior mod cons takes on the distance and remoteness and familiar strangeness of a dream. The display of luxury to be seen in so many films, most of them mediocre, takes on an almost fascinating character, and the spectator is uprooted from his everyday world by an everyday world other than his own. Escape into this illusory but present everyday world, the fascination of ordinary objects which scream wealth, the seductive powers of the apparently profound lives led by the men and women who move among these objects, all this explains the momentary success these films enjoy.