The issues at stake, then, go well beyond linguistic address (although this is, I would argue, the fundamental characteristic from which other behaviors evolve, just as language was the fundamental development that initiated the rapid development of the human species). As the technological nonconscious expands, the sedimented routines and habits joining human behavior to the technological infrastructure continue to operate mostly outside the realm of human awareness, coming into focus as objects of conscious attention only at moments of rupture, breakdown, and modifications and extensions of the system. Trauma, the site in these fictions through which the ambivalent relations of humans to intelligent machines are explored with special intensity, serves as the archetypal moment of breakdown that brings into view the extent to which our present and future are entwined with intelligent machines. No longer natural, human-only language increasingly finds itself in a position analogous to the conscious mind that, faced with disturbing dreams, is forced to acknowledge it is not the whole of mind. Code, performing as the interface between humans and programmable media, functions in the contemporary cultural Imaginary as the shadowy double of the human-only language inflected and infected by its hidden presence.
N. Katherine Hayles, "Traumas of Code"