The problem with the fourth quadrant is that it doesn’t fit neatly into our conventional left/right political categories. That’s why my Seattle interviewer wanted to know whether I had Communist leanings. Because these open systems operate outside the conventional incentives of capitalism, the mind reflexively wants to put them on the side of socialism. And yet they are as far from the command economies that Marx and Engels helped invent as they are from “greed is good” capitalism.

When we champion fourth-quadrant innovation, we are not arguing for top-down bureaucracies and central planning. Stalin would have despised Wikipedia.

My ideas about the fourth quadrant are themselves the product of open collaboration, building on ideas generated by thinkers like Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler, Jonathan Zittrain, Lisa Gansky, Tim O’Reilly, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow and many others. I can say with some confidence that not one of these people is a Communist, either. But when you try to use the standard means of categorizing us  are we for unfettered markets, or government intervention?  the answer suddenly becomes very murky.

We are all interested in the crucial kinds of value that emerge outside of traditional market economies and ownership structures. But many of us have advised or created for-profit companies. And we spend very little time talking about  or arguing for  the benevolent wisdom of Big Government.

Consider a recent start-up called Kickstarter, which embodies many of these complex values. Kickstarter is a site that allows individuals to fund creative projects, like movies, art installations, albums and so on. Donors may get special gifts in return for their contributions  signed copies of the final CD or an invitation to the opening  but they don’t own the creations they help support. In just two years of existence, Kickstarter has raised more than $20 million for thousands of projects, taking a small cut of each transaction.

The economic exchange that Kickstarter enables between donors and creators works outside the traditional logic of markets. People are “investing” in others not for the promise of financial reward, but for the social rewards of supporting important work. The artists, on the other hand, are relying on a decentralized network of support, not government grants. And somehow, in the middle of these new models of collaboration, lies Kickstarter itself, a for-profit company that may well make a nice return for its own investors and founders.

So, no, I am not a Communist.

BUT the problem is that we don’t have a word that does justice to those of us who believe in the generative power of the fourth quadrant. My hope is that the blurriness is only temporary, the strange disorientation one finds when new social and economic values are being formed.

The choice shouldn’t be between decentralized markets and command-and-control states. Over these last centuries, much of the history of innovation has lived in a less formal space between those two regimes: in the grad seminar and the coffeehouse and the hobbyist’s home lab and the digital bulletin board. The wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from the proprietary clash between private firms. They also emerged from open networks.