{"id":1466,"date":"2003-09-22T19:11:57","date_gmt":"2003-09-23T02:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/09\/22\/1466.html"},"modified":"2003-09-22T19:11:57","modified_gmt":"2003-09-23T02:11:57","slug":"end-of-diamond-industry-predic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/09\/22\/end-of-diamond-industry-predic\/","title":{"rendered":"End of diamond industry predicted, film at 11"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There's an interesting article at Wired<\/cite> called \"The New Diamond Age<\/a>,\" discussing two American companies that are producing the highest-quality artificial diamonds yet. The Wired<\/cite> article portrays De Beers, the giant diamond cartel, as scared of this development. (Both of the artificial-diamond companies, btw, are aiming in the long run to make computer processors out of diamond, which will allow processors to run much hotter than they currently can.)<\/p>\n

But I read the article with a fairly large grain of salt, for two reasons:<\/p>\n

First, Wired<\/cite> is in the business of overhyping technology. I tend to assume that any development that magazine says will take the world by storm in a year or two will probably take more like ten, while most developments that they say are still in the experimental stages will never get much further.<\/p>\n

Second, and more importantly, the article makes it sound like the pure force of personality of retired brigadier general (and founder of artificial-diamond company Gemesis) Carter Clarke should be sufficient to topple the De Beers empire. I doubt De Beers will go down without a pretty good fight. Three years ago, Salon<\/cite> published an article (\"Not Forever<\/a>\") which suggested that \"The death of South African diamond magnate Harry Oppenheimer last month might mark the end of global domination for one of the world's most infamous cartels.\" I haven't seen any evidence that De Beers has lost significant ground since then. Furthermore, the Salon<\/cite> article draws heavily from a 1982 Atlantic<\/cite> article, an astonishing and eye-opening exposé of the diamond industry (\"Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?<\/a>\"), the tag line of which read \"An unruly market may undo the work of a giant cartel and of an inspired, decades-long ad campaign.\" Twenty-plus years later, De Beers is still going strong.<\/p>\n

If you want more reasons to dislike De Beers after reading all that, you might take a look at Anil Dash's rant from earlier this year about De Beers advertising<\/a>. (Careful following links from that piece, btw; at least one of them is definitely not work-safe.)<\/p>\n

But despite all of the above, I'll be surprised if De Beers is in any more trouble a year from now than it is today. The company is awfully good at manipulating the public (see the Atlantic<\/cite> article for lots of details on how they created and controlled the demand for diamonds); I'll be surprised if they can't weather an influx of artificial diamonds.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an interesting article at Wired called “The New Diamond Age,” discussing two American companies that are producing the highest-quality…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}