Joe’s key insight about online courses was that they required less of him — and that was the feature, not the bug. If someone’s teaching you math and they have to be there every time you do math, that’s a bad teacher. The goal of good teaching is to point people back to themselves so they no longer need you.
This principle extends to organizational design: the less the organization is needed for humanity’s development, the less risk of becoming a cult-like dependency structure. The need to be special, needed, or to save people is exactly what creates corrupted organizations. Online courses inherently create more autonomy because they integrate into daily life rather than producing a “workshop high.”