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Politics

8 min read

Politics

Few areas show the KmikeyM mechanism more clearly than Mike Merrill’s political identity. Over roughly a decade, shareholder votes moved Mike across nearly the entire political spectrum: from Democrat, to registered Republican, out of the Republican Party, and finally into the Democratic Socialists of America. Politics represents the earliest test of the market being the source of the beliefs that Merrill carries. It pushes the project’s central idea (that a life can be governed by the market) from external action to internal thinking.

Background

Before the experiment, Mike was a longtime Democrat, mostly focused on local Portland politics and generally a fan of lefty agitators. Once he began putting major decisions to shareholder vote, his political affiliation became just another item on the ballot, subject to the same logic as his diet, his wardrobe, and his relationships. The reasoning shareholders applied was rarely ideological. It was strategic: what was good for the share price, the brand, or the experiment itself.

One early episode sat at the intersection of Mike’s politics and the Portland Mercury orbit that would later supply his first shareholders. In 2004, Mike and Josh Berezin (a future KmikeyM shareholder) volunteered for Phil Busse’s “Me for Mayor” campaign. Busse, the Mercury’s managing editor, ran for Portland mayor on a platform of 100 ideas for his first 100 days, with donations capped at $100. The slogan started as a newsroom joke, but Busse meant it as “the collective ‘me,’” a candidacy built to give voters ownership of the campaign and of city hall, and he placed third in a field of 23. It was a joke the volunteer staff took seriously, and for several of them it became a launching point into careers in government, policy, and politics. A campaign organized around a publicly owned “me” was, in retrospect, an unusually direct rehearsal for what Mike would build four years later.

Registered Republican (2010)

In April 2010, shareholders voted to change Mike’s voter registration to Republican. The stated argument was that the Republican Party was more “business-friendly,” and therefore good for a man whose value was literally traded. Mike complied.

The decision became one of the most reported facts about KmikeyM after the vasectomy vote. VICE described him as “involuntarily, a registered Republican,” and quoted Mike leaning into the irony: “I am a registered Republican after all.” CNBC put it plainly: “They told him to switch parties and register as a Republican.” Wired framed it as the moment the experiment turned identity into a tradable position: “He was a longtime Democrat, but his investors decided to make him register as a Republican, which they argued was more business-friendly.”

The registration was not costless. For Mike’s girlfriend at the time, the Republican vote was a breaking point. As Wired reported, she “wanted to be in a relationship with Mike, not the entity known as Mike.” The political vote, layered on top of votes over diet and the body, contributed to their eventual split. As with the vasectomy vote, the people closest to the publicly traded person absorbed consequences they had not signed up for.

During this period Mike engaged seriously with the identity the market had assigned him, including research into the Republican Party’s post-2012 direction, even attending local Republican party events like a speech from Reince Priebus. The label was not a costume he ignored. It was a role he inhabited because shareholders had voted for it. Merrill endorsed Jon Huntsman in 2012 and then after much soul searching when he was defeated by Mitt Romney supported Obama as a “Rockefeller Republican”.

Leaving the Party (2016)

Initially amused by the campaign of Trump, Merrill hired a social media team to help him “live tweet” the Republican debates. As the rhetoric shifted and the party shifted to actually supporting this wildcard candidate Merrill had enough.

So in 2016 shareholders voted to support Mike’s proposition to end his Republican Party membership. The same mechanism that had moved him right could move him back. The political label was never permanent. It tracked shareholder sentiment, which shifted with the times and with the people holding shares.

The Bernie Primary and the DSA (2020 to 2021)

In the 2020 Democratic primary, it was becoming clear that the two-party system was failing America. In order to shake things up the shareholders chose Bernie Sanders as Mike’s candidate. Mike welcomed the result and the shift even further into the left. In his own words, studying Sanders pushed him “pretty far to the left politically,” and led him to learn about democratic socialism.

In early 2021, Mike submitted a request for comment proposing that he become “a dues-paying and card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America,” joining the Los Angeles chapter. The proposal is the clearest statement of the contradiction at the heart of the whole arc. Here was a person structured as a literal capitalist instrument, traded in shares, proposing to join an organization whose standard definition, as he himself quoted from the New York Times, holds that “democratic socialists don’t support capitalism: They want workers to control the means of production.”

Mike did not treat this as a contradiction to hide. He treated it as the point. KmikeyM, he wrote, “is not anti-capitalist or designed to prove any specific point.” It is a way to “play with capitalism,” to “see the positive and negative impacts” of a force “so ubiquitous it is almost invisible in the rest of our lives.” Joining the DSA was an extension of that, not a refutation of it: “I’m interested in seeing what happens when people try, and I’m especially interested in what happens if they are successful.”

The proposal also tied the political arc back to the project’s founding slogan, “Community Through Capitalism,” which Mike defined as the idea “that relationships are built because of capitalism. It’s a multiplayer game.” The shareholders who voted him into a socialist organization were themselves a community formed through the act of trading shares in him.

Adjacent votes

Political registration was the throughline, but it was not the only political question shareholders decided. In 2014, shareholders voted for Mike to favor the legalization of marijuana, with roughly 70 percent in support. Policy positions, like party labels, were treated as decisions the market could make.

We see this governance of belief extending beyond politics and policies with the 2021 vote that ratified Merrill’s belief in ghosts, and the test of “Policy Votes” which holds Merrill as a “Skeptical Observer” of crypto.

Significance

The political arc is a demonstration of the KmikeyM thesis. Other votes tested whether shareholders could govern a body (the vasectomy) or a diet. The political votes tested whether they could govern a worldview, and the answer, repeatedly, was yes.

What the arc reveals is that the system reflects sentiment, not ideology. Mike did not become a Republican out of conviction, or leave out of conviction, or join the DSA out of conviction. Each move followed a vote, and each vote followed whatever the shareholders found compelling at that moment: profit logic in 2010, a changed mood by 2016, a leftward turn by 2020 and 2021. The publicly traded person is a mirror held up to the people who own him.

It is also the arc that most fully embodies “Community Through Capitalism.” A man sold as a capitalist instrument was carried, by the votes of his shareholders, all the way to the Democratic Socialists of America. The market did not enforce an ideology. It enabled an exploration, and the destination was wherever the community decided to point it.

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See also

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