How the OJ trial foreshadowed internet culture
The OJ Simpson drama of 1994 and 1995 was in many ways a preview of the modern internet, from early web sleuths to early memes.
In June 1994, when the late OJ Simpson was charged with murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her lover Ron Goldman, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Still, with hindsight, it's easy to realize that modern internet culture was all around us.
Not literally, of course. The Netscape browser would not be released for another six months. If you wanted to tie up your phone line, fire up your 56K modem and "surf the internet" (a then-obscure phrase coined by a librarian), you could use the buggy Mosaic browser. But you had to know your sites and services: a couple of nerds had just started a directory called Yahoo, but would not add a "search" feature until 1995, after the OJ trial had begun.
The internet grew up fast that year. It did so in part by offering places for OJ obsessives to congregate. "Scores of O.J.-related data bases [sic], interactive discussion forums and electronic mail lists have opened in cyberspace since last June," the New York Times noted in February 1995, in a story that now seems too quaint to be real. The defunct service provider Prodigy "already has 20,000 O.J.-related messages in its data base," while over on "America on-Line," the "Court TV forum is abuzz with armchair analysts."
In "the first trial of the digital century," the Times' Peter Lewis enthused, "anyone with access to a personal computer, a modem and a telephone line can be a [defense attorney] Robert Shapiro, a [prosecutor] Marcia Clark, a [judge] Lance Ito, or a Geraldo". You could almost hear pearls being clutched up and down Park Avenue.
Some of our extremely online future was already lurking in those forums. GIFs: check. ("One area on the web, as it is called, allows visitors to view, over and over, a video clip of Mr. Simpson pleading not guilty at his arraignment," Lewis wrote) Casual conspiracy theorists: check. (Ito switched his Toshiba laptop for an IBM Thinkpad; was he surfing the internet during the trial?) Randos suddenly becoming experts: check. ("We are as up to date as the lawyers are," boasted a Canadian OJ website owner of his 10,000 users. "It makes for intelligent discussions.")
But here's the thing: next to the wall-to-wall cable TV coverage and the screaming front pages, those online discussions often did seem intelligent. (For a sense of the media attitude at the time, compare this very sober website from a reporter at the time to the shocking CNN page for the trial, which splashed the blood of the crime scene all over its front page.) All of the craziness we associate with a frenzied, social media-driven news event was already present in 1994 and 1995, albeit in altered form.
The Bronco chase, where OJ fled arrest, threatening to shoot himself while a fleet of cops followed at a distance for 75 miles? That was the 20th century version of a must-watch livestream. The barely-changing image had an estimated 95 million viewers, more than that year's Super Bowl, and ten times the current record for a livestream. If it happened now, the Bronco chase would break the internet — or at least come a lot closer than the daughter of OJ's friend Robert Kardashian ever did. (The OJ trial arguably ushered in the Kardashians, and the reality-show culture that arrived in their wake.)
These days, social media users with drones would likely track down the Bronco faster than news helicopters, which took an hour to find him. Still, if anything, the Bronco chase was more interactive than a livestream: Knowing the car was tuned to his radio station, a sports announcer connected Simpson with a former coach who persuaded OJ to put the gun down.
There were memes during the trial, certainly, even if we didn't call them that. Star witness Kato Kaelin, a Z-list actor who lived in OJ's guest house, was a one-man meme machine. "Ooops, lawsuit" became one of the most widely-used phrases of 1995 after Kaelin uttered it. He'd accidentally poked a juror with a pointer he was using to point out areas of the Simpson estate on a board.
The fact that Kaelin's mind went there seemed to encapsulate the madness swirling all around the courthouse. There were lawsuits and threats of lawsuits in every direction. Anyone even tangentially close to the case wanted their 15 minutes of fame as much as any modern influencer. The scrutiny on this cast of characters was unbearable for any one of them, and image was everything even long after the trial (hence Marcia Clark's makeover, which she continued to makeover).
The entire trial turned on something that was then, and remains, a very popular meme. "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit": star defense attorney Johnnie Cochran's rhyme was as reductive as a political tweet (and as cynical: the glove found at the scene didn't fit OJ's hand because dried blood had shrunk it, and the defendant wasn't exactly trying hard to pull it on over a rubber glove). In 2024 the rhyme is an image macro, spread far and wide on TikTok and Instagram.
Comedy has changed, at least. What is really weird to remember at this distance is the way comedians and late-night talk shows felt they had license to produce content that would look tasteless at best, and racist or misogynistic at worst, on YouTube today. Tonight Show host Jay Leno regularly featured a troupe of dancers that looked like Judge Ito and one that looked like Marcia Clarke, even changing her haircut. That was it, that was the bit.
But in general, the conversations America was having around the case — about domestic violence and murderous men, about racism in the LAPD, about celebrities buying their own tier of justice — are the same conversations we're having now, 30 years later. They were happening at street level, on the letters page, and on cable news, rather than on social media. The more you dig into this quintessential 1990s case, the less nostalgic that era becomes.