The Zcash Foundation has excellent documentation. Whitepapers explaining zero-knowledge proofs. Technical specifications for the protocol. Blog posts about financial privacy. The writing is clear, accurate, and comprehensive.

Almost nobody reads them.

We made a comic book about privacy and people actually learned something. Not because comics are trendy or because we wanted to seem accessible. It worked because stories do something documentation can't.

Privacy is abstract until it isn't.

Try explaining to someone why metadata matters. Their eyes glaze over. "So companies know what time I buy coffee. So what?"

You can cite studies about inference attacks. You can explain how transaction graphs reveal more than the transactions themselves. You can be completely right. They'll nod and forget.

The problem isn't intelligence. The problem is that privacy violations don't feel like anything until they happen to you. And by then it's too late to care about prevention.

Documentation assumes motivation. It answers questions for people who are already asking. But most people aren't asking about privacy. They're busy. They vaguely know it matters. They'll get to it later.

Later never comes.

There's a curse of knowledge that afflicts everyone who understands privacy deeply. You forget what it was like to not understand. You explain things the way they make sense to you now; technically, precisely, thoroughly.

This is exactly wrong.

When we built Privacy Chronicles, we didn't start with concepts. We started with Alex, a guy working a daily wage job who discovers his employer is tracking more than his hours. We started with a middle-class family realizing their smart home knows them better than they know themselves. We started with a tech founder choosing between profit and protecting her users.

These aren't explanations. They're experiences.

Stories are Trojan horses for ideas.

When you read documentation about surveillance, you're in learning mode. You're evaluating claims, deciding if this is worth your time, looking for the summary. Your defenses are up.

When you follow a character through a story, you're in experiencing mode. You're not evaluating whether surveillance is bad. You're feeling Alex's unease when he realizes his coffee purchases are being logged. You're not learning a concept. You're borrowing someone else's realization.

This is the trick. Narrative creates stakes before explaining concepts. By the time you understand what's happening, you already care about it.

Comics specifically have advantages I didn't expect.

First: visual plus text means two encoding paths into memory. You remember what you see and what you read. This isn't a minor boost. It's roughly double the retention. I won't cite the research because Paul Graham wouldn't, but it's real.

Second: pacing is built into the medium. One panel, then the next. You can't skim a comic the way you skim an article. There's no "let me jump to the conclusion." You go through it in order, at roughly the pace the creator intended.

Third: you can show things that take paragraphs to explain. A single panel of Alex's face when he sees his transaction history splayed across a screen communicates something that would take 500 words to write and still wouldn't land the same way.

Fourth: the perceived effort is lower. Someone who would never open a PDF about financial privacy will click on a comic. They'll start it. And starting is most of the battle.

We structured Privacy Chronicles as five episodes across five social classes. Daily wage worker, middle class, tech founder, wealthy elite, activist. Same theme. Different angles.

This was deliberate.

When you present a single story, people sort themselves. "That's not me. I'm not a daily wage worker. This doesn't apply." The class structure makes that impossible. You watch Alex and think "that's not me." Then you watch the middle-class family and something clicks. Or you watch the tech founder and realize you've made those trade-offs.

By the fifth episode, privacy isn't political anymore. It's personal. You've seen yourself somewhere in the arc.

The progression matters too. Awareness, complicity, ethical conflict, helplessness, action. It mirrors the journey most people take when they actually start caring about privacy. We're not just explaining the problem. We're modeling the path through it.

Documentation fails in a specific way.

Good docs answer "how." How does zero-knowledge proof work? How do I use shielded transactions? How is this different from Bitcoin? These are important questions. Documentation answers them well.

But docs can't answer "why should I care?" Not really. You can write a section called "Why This Matters" but it reads like marketing. It's someone telling you to care, not showing you why.

You can't document someone into caring.

There's a pipeline that most technical projects assume: explain the solution → people understand → people adopt.

It almost never works.

The actual pipeline is: feel the problem → seek solutions → find your thing → read the docs.

Most projects are optimized for the last step. They have no strategy for the first.

Here's the broader principle: match the medium to the stage of understanding.

When someone doesn't know they have a problem, you need stories. Narrative. Emotion. Characters they can identify with. Something that makes the abstract concrete and the distant immediate.

When someone knows they have a problem and is evaluating solutions, you need clear comparisons. Feature lists. Trade-off analysis. Honest assessments of limitations.

When someone has chosen your solution and wants to implement it, you need documentation. Tutorials. API references. Troubleshooting guides.

Most projects do this backwards. They write great docs, mediocre marketing pages, and no stories at all. Then they wonder why nobody's reading the docs.

There's an objection here: isn't this just marketing? Aren't you just describing content marketing with extra steps?

Sort of. But the difference matters.

Marketing tries to convince you to want something. Stories try to show you something true. Privacy Chronicles isn't persuading you that privacy matters through clever rhetoric. It's showing you scenarios real patterns of how privacy erodes and letting you draw conclusions.

The distinction is manipulation versus demonstration. One respects your intelligence. The other exploits your psychology.

I think there's room for honest stories. Stories that don't exaggerate the problem or oversimplify the solution. Stories that show real trade-offs and real consequences. We tried to make that kind of story. Whether we succeeded is for readers to judge.

If you're building something important and nobody seems to care, the problem probably isn't your documentation. Your docs might be great. You might have the best technical writing in your field.

The problem is that you're explaining the solution before people feel the problem.

Go make the problem real. Tell a story. Show someone discovering what you already know. Make it concrete and human and specific.

Then, when they come looking for answers, your documentation will be there.

Check out PRIVACY CHRONICLES: privacy-chronicles.vercel.app