CONCEPT
The Excoded
Joy Buolamwini’s term for the people harmed by algorithmic systems—wrong-arrested, loan-denied, hiring-filtered, rendered invisible—who fall on the wrong side of tools optimized for someone else, fusing exclusion with code to insist that algorithmic harm constitutes a class, not a series of isolated incidents.
The excoded are the people who experience the
coded gaze not as an abstract structural condition but as concrete, consequential harm: wrongly arrested on the strength of a bad facial-recognition match, denied a loan by a scoring model, filtered out of a hiring pipeline, rendered invisible by a sensor never calibrated for their skin.
Joy Buolamwini coined the word by fusing exclusion with code, and the fusion does deliberate political work. The technology industry prefers to discuss such harms one error at a time, treating each as an isolated bug to be patched: a false arrest becomes a regrettable individual case, a discriminatory denial becomes a customer-service matter. By naming the excoded as a group, Buolamwini resists this atomization. She points out that the same structural forces produce the same kinds of victims again and again, and that those victims are not randomly distributed. They cluster among the people the coded gaze never