Rob Walker, who wrote some of the best New York Times Magazine articles of recent years (like this one and this one), has a new piece in the Atlantic about a man who decided to sell shares not in a company but in himself, giving crowdsourcing a human face. The opening:

“Mike Merrill was thinking of pumping up his workout regimen with mixed-martial-arts classes and boxing lessons. The scheme would involve seven and a half hours a week at various gyms—a big commitment. So he put the matter before his 160 shareholders. They, after all, had previously determined that he would not get a vasectomy, that he would register as a Republican, and that he and the woman he’d been dating could enter into a three-month ‘Relationship Agreement.’

From microfinance to crowd-funding, tools that rely on the support of large groups have grown familiar, bordering on overexposed. Merrill’s approach to harvesting the power of the marketplace, however, is singular: he has essentially sold shares in his own life. Which raises two questions: Why on Earth would somebody offer others the right to vote on his basic life decisions? And, even more inexplicably, why would anybody pay for that right?”