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Civil disobedience does not mean running around being a nuisance until the powers that be are so annoyed they just give in to get you to go away. Civil disobedience is about violating an obviously unjust law and willingly accepting the punishment, stoking public outrage at the clear disconnect between the law and their own morality. You're removing the government's ability to hide its oppression behind selective enforcement by daring them to arrest popular people of unimpeachable character for something most people do not believe, in their hearts, to be wrong.
Reckless Ben is not engaging in civil disobedience. At best, he's a vigilante, but that's far too cool a label for a YouTube "pranker."
That trick only worked once. Now the penalties are so high that unless the government is already on your side, you simply get buried under the jail if you try this. All modern civil disobedience is either counterproductive or theatrical.
I think that's more a product of all the good moral crusades already being taken. The low hanging fruit has been plucked, and the sort of stark injustices capable of motivating large swathes of normies to force political change merely by their public enforcement simply don't exist anymore in western countries. The oppressions are more subtle, better targeted, better cloaked within layers of bureaucratic plausible deniability, such that enforcing them on charismatic protesters isn't enough, standing alone, to provoke the public to action. Nothing modern protesters are fighting for has the kind of broad appeal necessary for civil disobedience to work.
Moreover, governments have cottoned on to the PR trick, and have figured out it's more effective to just let the attractive college kids tucker themselves out and go home rather than allow them to make sympathetic spectacles of themselves getting roughed up by burly state troopers. No one's stupid enough to break up peaceful protests with firehoses and german shepherds anymore.
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