Community Through Capitalism
“Community Through Capitalism” is the slogan of KmikeyM. It has appeared on the platform, in press coverage, and as the sign-off on Mike Merrill’s shareholder newsletters for most of the project’s life. It is also the project’s shortest self-description: three words that name what selling shares in a person is actually for.
What it means
Merrill has given one canonical definition, written in 2021 when he proposed joining the Democratic Socialists of America and needed to explain how a capitalist instrument could point left:
“The impulse of KmikeyM has always been to experiment and play with capitalism. The slogan I’ve used for years, ‘Community Through Capitalism’ is about how relationships are built because of capitalism. It’s a multiplayer game and by selling shares of myself we all get to play around with this concept that is so ubiquitous it is almost invisible in the rest of our lives.”
The claim runs backwards from the usual defense of markets. The standard story says markets are useful and community is a side effect. The slogan says community is the point and the market is the machine that builds it. Shareholders show up to trade, vote, and argue about Merrill’s life, and the trading is what turns strangers into a group with a shared stake.
The word “capitalism” is doing deliberate work. Merrill could have said “community through markets” or “through investment,” but the slogan keeps the ideologically loaded term and plays it straight. Capitalism is, in his phrase, “so ubiquitous it is almost invisible.” KmikeyM makes it visible by shrinking it to the scale of one person, where the shares, the votes, and the price can all be watched in the open.
In the wild
The earliest documented use is a talk title: “Community through Capitalism, a Personal Take on Cybernetic Management,” delivered at CyborgCamp Portland in August 2012. Merrill’s own talk history reaches back further, listing a “Community Through Capitalism” talk at Portland’s Research Club in December 2009. The phrase does not appear in archived 2008 captures of kmikeym.com, so it seems to have emerged in the project’s first years rather than at launch.
The press picked the phrase up early. In 2014 the Portland Mercury described KmikeyM’s stakeholders as participants in “the ‘Community Through Capitalism’ experiment,” in “Crowdsourcing the Future,” a piece reporting on shareholders voting a 17-year-old programmer toward his GED.
For years the phrase ran under Merrill’s signature on the K5M shareholder newsletters, italicized, where a company would put its motto. Merrill’s talks introduce it the same way he does everywhere else: “The slogan for my project is ‘Community Through Capitalism.‘”
Inside the project’s own vocabulary, the slogan is the casual register. When KmikeyM needs to sound serious it calls itself a governance and identity protocol; when it explains itself to a curious stranger, it is “a multiplayer game” built on community through capitalism.
The slogan tested
The phrase reads as a joke and is also a literal description of the method. The Publicly Traded Person makes the same observation from the other direction: a publicly traded person is someone who has chosen to hold their identity in common with other people, and the motto describes how the holding works.
Its sharpest test is the political arc documented in Politics. Between 2010 and 2021, shareholder votes carried Merrill from Democrat to registered Republican to dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. A man structured as a capitalist instrument was voted into an organization that opposes capitalism, by a community that capitalism assembled. The slogan survived the trip intact because it never promised an ideology, only that the market would produce a community and the community would decide where to point him.