> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase.

It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.

Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.

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throwaway2037 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Wiki says: "The film grossed $171 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations..."

That is popular by any reasonable definition.

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yorwba 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

That makes it popular for a movie. It also means that most people didn't watch it, at least not in theaters. (I guess that would be true even for the most popular movie of all time. The most popular thing in some category is rarely more popular than the entire rest of the category combined.)

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kergonath 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Even if every viewer paid $1, that would be 171 millions people, which really is not that much compared to even the population of North America and Europe combined.

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Eisenstein 4 days ago | parent [-]

Most people don't watch films in the theater run exclusively. It has been viewed by many hundreds of millions of people after it left the box office. Also, network effects account for a lot. One person seeing the film and talking about blood diamonds to their friends and family leads to 2 others who look into it, which leads to 4 more, etc. That's how ideas spread.

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kergonath 4 days ago | parent [-]

It does not exist in a vacuum. I am not even arguing that the movie was irrelevant, but it was not that huge a deal and it was not the only voice in the discussion. The point in the parent was that ethics was not a driver because there was no inflection point when the movie was released, which to me is fallacious.

	▲	mattmaroon 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		He’s also just got his timing wrong. The movie came out when artificial diamonds were scarce and pricey. The technology accelerated after that, and the shifting mores could definitely have played a part.

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indymike 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.

The movie exposed an opportunity - what if we could have diamonds without the oppression? Oppression is very high cost.