4 ideas
A young couple, Maurice and Marthe, fall asleep in the 1840s and wake in the year 3000, guided by a figure named John Progrès through a society organized entirely around commerce and machines. They find children raised by mechanical systems rather than parents, citizens identified by numbers, and art, learning and affection judged only by what they yield.
A society that measures progress only by productivity and technical mastery will steadily convert every human good into a means for output. Once utility is the only accepted standard, affection, beauty and conscience cannot justify themselves and are discarded as inefficiencies.
When administration and commerce become the organizing logic of life, individuals are handled as interchangeable, countable units rather than as persons with names and histories. The number is not only a label. It is how the system perceives people, so whatever cannot be counted, such as character, attachment or inner life, stops existing for the institutions that govern them.
To criticize the present, take a trend already visible, such as mechanization, market valuation or bureaucratic classification, and project it unchecked a thousand years forward until it governs everything. The exaggeration makes the logic of current habits visible, because readers recognize their own world in the absurd one. The future setting works as a magnifying glass on the present, not as a prediction.