I think it’s an open question how the internet will support research collaboration. There’s clear success stories such as Wikipedia when it comes to mass scale contribution, but fewer specific research innovations outside of open source projects. My best guess is that the types of collaborations will simply be different (The Bazaar and The Cathedral documents this well).

The internet is arguably better at flourishing novel ideas than Bell Labs was. For instance, machine learning Twitter is an active and relatively small community. Excellent ideas from obscure researchers often rise to prominence within hours when retweeted by a more followed researcher. This wouldn’t happen as often in a building, and the type of idea discovery that Twitter allows is just the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s worth realizing the significant downsides to in person collaboration (nothing is saved, it's entirely flow vs stock, you need enough status to be hired in the first place).

I was in the first class of the Thiel Fellowship, a decentralized program that tended to centralize itself anyway in pockets (groups of us rented big houses and lived together). The combination of in-person and distributed was a great midway, and I predict the Shannon Fellowship will be similar.

I'm excited to see what the Bell Labs of the Internet looks like, and I think it's too early to say decentralization will simply not work.

(disclosure: mentor for Shannon Fellowship)