My friend Beau Gunderson showed me KmikeyM, a project in which “shareholders” get to vote on what Mike Merrill does with his life. Merrill describes his endeavor like this:

By “buying shares” in Mike Merrill you are in effect giving me money. In exchange, I am valuing your input on my choices based on how many of those shares you buy. As this mini-economy grows, my stock price will become a benchmark for my success; the higher the stock price, the more optimistic my shareholders are.

When Shareholder Questions come up, stock owners will be able to vote on significant choices in my life. The more shares you have, the more weight your vote has. You could be the only person voting to send me to night school, but with enough shares behind you, I’m going to enroll. Ostensibly, if we make the right choices, we both win.

Here are some recent decisions that Merrill crowdsourced: Should he accept any and all Facebook friend requests? (No.) Should he subscribe to Spotify? (Yes.) Should he un-register as a Republican? (Yes.) There are many, many more proposals and results.

Is this performance art? Is it business? A sensible way to run your life? Markets are very good at aggregating and weighing preferences, but there’s no guarantee that Merrill’s shareholders will optimize for his values or goals. I suppose he protects himself by only offering up fairly trivial questions.

KmikeyM reminds me of Sarah Meyohas’ stock-trading paintings and Justin.tv, the precursor to Twitch. I deeply wish that I’d come up with the idea first! Of course, there’s no reason why I couldn’t copy him… Would you buy Sonya Shares?

Correction: Mike Merrill allowed the shareholders to dictate whether he would propose to his girlfriend. (They voted yes, but an inside source told me that he hasn’t done it yet.) That’s not a trivial question at all!