On Sat, 27 Oct 2018, D. Margaux wrote:
> UNDEAD seems super interesting. I just looked at a bunch of emails from
> the archive, but how did that end up? Was the contract ever revealed?
The origin of the UNDEAD is actually interesting to bring up in relation
to your latest political party idea.
It came about in 2002. At the time, we had Political parties, called
Groups. Relevant features of Groups:
1. Overtly political; they competed with each other for power;
2. You were only allowed to belong to one Group;
3. Their operating charters (i.e. Contracts) were required to be
public;
4. If your Group had 3+ members, it had N extra votes on Proposals.
But this didn't scale - no matter how many more than 3 members
you had, your Group got the same N votes.
This meant, if you had 6 members, it made sense to split into 2 groups,
9 members => 3 Groups. Etc.
So the UNDEAD charter was a "contract behind the contracts" that bound
members of UNDEAD Groups, so they could split to maximize votes. The
Charter for each Group said something like "The Only Regulation in this
Charter is that its members are bound by the [secret] UNDEAD agreement".
There were various attempts to force public revelation of the UNDEAD
agreement that failed - in part because one clause of the UNDEAD
agreement, that was purposefully not secret, is that it would
retroactively self-amend itself to protect itself from discovery
processes.
There were 2 "admitted" UNDEAD Groups IIRC, and multiple Groups that
were secretly UNDEAD (didn't acknowledge the UNDEAD agreement in their
charter). It's modular nature meant it could even be internomic for
a while - there were UNDEAD groups in other Nomics.
There were many scams up until ~2007 which marked a major shift in game
play. Looking back from this distance, the only UNDEAD result with
lasting impact was the Town Fountain (and some Champion titles I'm
sure). Since then it's been quieter, though with occasional evidence
of coordinated actions. I think the last thing that the UNDEAD took
credit for publicly was in ~2013-2014 maybe?
