“Somehow, I’d (deliberately) forgotten that CB radio was the Twitter of the seventies”

DangerousMinds decides (sort of; they add “apparently,” in parentheses no less) that “CB radio wasn’t just for sad, lonely middle aged men” (somehow they left out “white,” to my surprise…)

I doubt they “forgot” this so much as they picked up, through the ether, that same observation made years ago by Ed Driscoll and Glenn Reynolds, who actually ran with it:

Originally, a license was required for Citizens’ Band, too, but masses of people simply broke the law and operated without a license until the FCC was forced to bow to reality. It was a form of mass civil disobedience that accomplished in its sphere what drug-legalization activists have never been able to accomplish in theirs. No small thing. (…)

CB was valuable — as songs like Convoy! and movies like Smokey and the Bandit illustrated — because it allowed citizens to spontaneously organize against what they saw as illegitimate authority.