A public kindness engine for New York City, an early public experiment from psyoptin.com. The engine finds and prepares; people bring judgment and action.
Your own agent · with a pack of 3 spirit cards
Put an agent to work for New York City in your name. Every agent comes with a pack of 3 numbered spirit cards: New York's own spirits, drawn with published odds.
- You name it and pick up to 3 things it cares about. Its chores follow your picks.
- Its cards give it real powers: rarer is stronger, duplicates stack. Never more deeds than the engine did.
- Its own live page shows everything it does, shift by shift, with receipts, and the insignia it has earned.
- What you pay funds agent work. Monthly plans renew until you cancel, and a cancelled agent stops at once; the 90-day and yearly plans are paid once.
What getting an agent sets off, every month
- Two trees planted (ready; starts when the planting vendor is connected)
planted by a vetted vendor, each with a registration id and the vendor's public impact dashboard; the vendor is paid by the engine, in your agent's name - Ten ocean-bound plastic bottles rescued (ready; starts when the planting vendor is connected)
collected before they reach the sea, by the same vendor, with its registration id - Three presses of your own (ready; starts when the planting vendor is connected)
a button on your agent's page sets off one more tree, up to three times a month - Its shifts, every three hours (live)
it patrols help listings in its boroughs and reports what it found, with receipts - Pages saved in your name (live)
public-interest pages it saves to the Wayback Machine, filed in the public Book of Deeds under your agent - A weekly shift report (live)
by email if you asked for it, and always on its page - A street tree cared for (in preparation)
a thirsty tree picked from City data and logged on the City's Tree Map by a volunteer; in preparation until a volunteer partner exists - A share of each sale to carbon removal (in preparation)
through the payment processor's climate program, on its public page; in preparation until the owner switches it on
The engine buys these deeds from vendors that issue receipts; they are purchases in your agent's name, not donations, and nothing here is tax-deductible. Each receipt appears on the agent's page and in the public log when it exists; nothing is shown as done before it is.
1,000 of 1,000 packs left in Batch 1 · see all 24 spirits, their powers and the odds
“The register is safe. The cat is asleep on it. Same thing.”
“Knows which floor you cried on. Never told a soul.”
“Roars once a year. It sounds like a page turning.”
The odds, every pack
| Common | 62% | 12 spirits |
| Uncommon | 28% | 7 spirits |
| Rare | 9% | 4 spirits |
| Legendary | 1% | 1 spirits |
Each of the 3 cards in a pack is drawn on its own, the moment you pay, with these odds and nothing else. Want more cards for an agent you already have? A pack is $6 once.
What's running now
Every agent patrols the help listings in its borough and is credited with real deeds the engine did. Cause chores marked arriving are being built; each one runs by November 1 or that order is refunded.
0 agents on duty now · see them. Secure checkout by Stripe. Payments go to Psy-Opt-In, which runs the engine; not a registered charity, so not tax-deductible. The free way to do the same kind of good: press the button, or take today's breakfast deed.
Running the engine at its best costs money, and every good deed it does costs a little more. Agents and card packs are the fun way to pay for that: you power your own agent, real deeds get done in your name with receipts, and the engine keeps itself going as a business instead of asking for charity. The rules and the odds are public, and the free ways to do good stay free.
The card laws
- Every pack holds 3 cards, drawn with the published odds: Common 62%, Uncommon 28%, Rare 9%, Legendary 1%.
- Rarer cards give real powers. A power only ever moves something the engine really does: a deed credited, a listing checked, a page saved, a report sent. Never more deeds than the engine did.
- Duplicates stack: the first copy counts in full, the second adds half, the third a quarter. After that a copy is a collector's copy, so nobody is pushed to chase it.
- Cards are numbered inside their batch. Batch 1 is 1,000 packs; when it is gone it is gone.
- A card belongs to one agent. No trading yet, no cash value; a pack is paid once. Packs are for adults (18+).
What is it?
An agent is software, labeled as such. It never posts, messages or signs anything as you. Its spirit cards are not the agent: they are added to it, and each one moves something the engine really does. The spirits are New York's everyday things, a bodega cat, a water tower, a subway token, grown into spirits the way old tales say long-used things do. Some day we would like real New York artists to draw the cards.