Synthetic Diamonds & the Economics of Desire: Reverse Mediation for the Maintenance of Capitalist Realism

ABSTRACT Since the late 1990s, the diamond industry has struggled to recover from the public outcry against so-called blood diamonds. A recent innovation may change that. Synthetic diamonds are gem-grade stones produced in a sterile lab – far from the notorious bloodied mines. The online retailers who sell these lab-grown jewels publicly disavow their mined counterparts while emphasizing their own products’ ethicality. This rhetorical strategy, which I term reverse mediation, enables industries to sublimate consumers’ guilt for their complicity in decades of grotesque consumption and offer the market a more ethical alternative to re-ignite consumers’ desire. In the era of capitalist realism, reverse mediation is an important mechanism to maintain the tacit consent of an increasingly skeptical public.