Hello, my name is Mike Merrill, and I’m your new investment.

KmikeyM.com is a personal decision making engine modeled after a stock market. By measuring influence as the number of shares a person has we’ve created a way to quantify opinion.

Of course it’s not a real share like you might buy on the NYSE or NASDAQ. There is no company behind KmikeyM and so the “ownership” you hold is actually a just a metaphor for trust. We have built a fully-functional market simulation and we borrow a lot of language and concepts from the business world in order to make the process easy to understand.

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.

Sure, you might say that this is an incomplete way of measuring my success — or that a business model is not conducive to the execution of creative projects. I don’t see it this way. Business is a social science of managing people to organize and maintain collective productivity, and to accomplish particular creative and productive goals; after all, the etymology of the word “business” refers to the state of being busy.

It’s not about generating profits, particularly, although that will likely happen: it’s about a group of people working towards the same goal. By using an adapted structure of the market economy, you and I have a ready-built mechanism for operations, accountability, and measuring success that is not only well documented but also easily understood.

Mike Merrill is sometimes referred to as an “artist”, and we all know how crazy artists can be.