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It’s incentivized by ‘nature’ in the same way Big Macs are incentivized by nature. Sure it is great in the short term, but there’s a reason cultured and place rootedness evolved. I’d imagine this hyper mobility would begin to lead to anomie, loss of community, general unrest… oh wait….
Having supersonic aircraft and computers and industrial agriculture is more incentivized by nature than 'not atomizing communities' is disincentivized. And taking all the smartest people and putting them in the same social circles is very useful for that. It's much easier for a smart elite group to somehow get an above-replacement fertility rate, or develop agi, than for small rooted communities to evolve computers and nukes, so the former seems more fit in the long run i think. A lot of stable equilibria in nature look locally like 'unrest', e.g. groups of related animals fighting over territory. Big Macs are basically pure negative in a way that 'having all the most capable people in the world develop technology together' isn't.
In the absence of predation, deer are incentivized by nature to reproduce much more than they're incentivized to balance their population against the food sources... right up until they overgraze and overpopulate, and have a mass die-off.
Feedback systems are complex and discontinuous. Maybe "not atomized communities" is more incentivized than you think, and the incentive just lags a bit.
The problem is that the "not atomized communities" can just be (hypothetically) glassed and population-replaced by the atomized communities that use that atomization to build modern technology. There are existing relatively illiberal nations that are still very modern and atomized relative to e.g. the amish who'd love to do that if the international system was different. That's a strong selection pressure!
Actually that's not really a hypothetical is it, it describes the rise of the modern state.
That's certainly one available interpretation of the available evidence, and it's not one I can conclusively disprove from our present position. I strongly suspect that it's wrong, though.
I would agree with you that "liberal" and "atomized" are at least somewhat orthogonal, in that you can have an illiberal society that is still quite atomized; I think the Soviet Union did a pretty good job of creating such a society. What I don't think is that atomized is itself particularly sustainable, and I don't think technology actually helps. Put it this way: a Colt 1911 decisively trumps fists in a standup fight, but the person with the 1911 can still lose the fight if they are so mentally ill that they decide it's a good idea to shoot themselves in the head instead.
The tech that you cite as providing atomized societies a decisive advantage over non-atomized societies stops providing that advantage if the atomized society turns the tech on itself, and atomization provides an abundance of incentives to do exactly that. I do not think we have hit the end of this particular slope, and I do not think most people are doing a good job of anticipating what the approaching reaches of the down-slope look like. I don't think the Amish have much to worry about.
Maybe I'm seeing the past through nostalgia-glasses, or maybe you mean "atomized" in a different way than I assume, but I think you're wrong on that one. A family of 4 living in what only passes for a studio apartament today, and having to squeeze in 10 more when family from the other Soviet Socialist Republic comes over for a visit every other Christmas, has a way of un-atomizing people.
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