But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this
applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started,
often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of
your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back
in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the
medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that
channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be
broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a
hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down
signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a
near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to
overwhelm the signal.
-- William Gibson. Spook Country (2007), p.111.