Today's politics is cultural.

Even economic and foreign policy issues are, in the end, defined in terms of social issues. This creates identification, and coalitions among people who might not otherwise find common ground -- hedonistic Wall Street investment bankers and small town Kansas preachers, for instance.

I am coming to believe the next political divide will be technological. That is, your politics will be defined by your attitude toward technology.

On one side you will find open source technophiles. On the other you will find proprietary technophobes.

It's a process that will take time to work itself out, just as millions of Southern Democrats initially resisted the pull of Nixon. Because there are are divisions within each grand coalition we have today, on this subject.

• On the right you see many people who work in open source, or who worry about their privacy, asking hard questions of security buffs and corporate insiders.
• On the left you see many people who consider themselves cyber-libertarians facing off against Hollywood types and those who create proprietary software.

This latter split gets most of the publicity, because more writers are in the cyber-libertarian school than anywhere else.

Initially, the proprietary, security-oriented side of this new political divide has the initiative. It has the government and, if a poll were taken, it probably has a majority on most issues.

But open source advocates have something more powerful on their side, history. You might call it the Moore's Law Dialectic.

Here's a citizen finding himself pulled by this dialectic. Readers of my fiction will know him well. It's Mark Cuban.

The link above is typical of his thinking on these subjects. Look at the title of this post -- The definition of insanity.. The Music Industry. The industry isn't moved by technical or business arguments because its resistance to you is political, Mark.

The Moore's Law Dialectic holds that technology must be open, that systems must be transparent, in order for rapid progress to take place, and the immense problems of our time to be solved. Only by working together can people reach the breakthroughs necessary to save mankind from his 20th century sins.

You hear this in the open source movement, both on the business and technology side. You hear it inside the cultural views of the cyber-libertarians, even the cyber-outlaws.

So here is an issue for our time, Linux.

Linux is being locked-out of the content world by politics. Microsoft's Trusted Computing Initiative, which Apple will follow, is a political act. It is based on a law passed by politicians, the DMCA, a sort of Tonkin Gulf Resolution for the Internet Generation. (The Internet, by the way, is the work of man that best embodies The Moore's Law Dialectic.)

Cory Doctorow, a long-time Mac user, says he will abandon the platform in political protest. In response, he will be forbidden from legally using content -- movies, music, all entertainment, over time. He will become a cyber-outlaw.

Millions and millions of us are going to become cyber-outlaws over the next few years. For some (especially on the right) the issue may be RFID chips in passports. For some (especially on the left) the issue may be Digital Rights Management.

Protest, in this case, will take the form of law-breaking. Encryption will be a tool of political protest. So will the use of peer-to-peer technology.

The correct path to take, as in the last political generation, is compromise. Neither side will admit that.

But here's my point. The Moore's Law Dialectic, over time, favors open source. It favors the protesters. You make more progress when your code is transparent, when people can freely work together, when real trust replaces the Law of Code.

This new political divide is nascent. It rides under the cultural divide of our time, which is becoming increasingly irrelevant. But listen to the blogosphere closely. Put your virtual ear close to the ground.

You will hear it clearly.