someone's faster on the draw

Spiders are organisms that create, to greater or lesser degrees, order. They create patterns of different sophistication on a regular basis from largely amorphous materials. Given enough time and incentive, certain species of spider can call genuinely astonishing patterns into existence.

This is a time when everyone is reaching for the top

Humanity produced its own Web, and only afterwards created its spiders. That doesn't mean the spiders in question are any less capable of spinning patterns out of it. It just means they have different silk to work with, and diferent prey to catch.

This is a place where second best will never do

When the creator of Tickle Me Elmo was arrested on suspicion of being UNABOM, it turned up on Usenet. He was released, and that was the end of that- but the news remained in the strands of information. When the designer of a decryption algorithm ten times faster than anything previously released ceased programming, it became a topic of conversation among the code-and-cipher community. That, too, got stuck in the strands. When a black car faster and more resilient than anything out of Detroit could possibly have been supposedly made its appearance all over the western US, it got noticed, and talked of. The same thing happened when a similar vehicle put on a display on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, then dropped out of sight.

It's okay to want to shine

Spiders are organisms that create order, not because of any particular desire to outdo entropy, but because they have flies to catch.

But once you step across that line

When Google Maps took sections of territory off its satellite scans at the behest of the U. S. Government, people noticed. Not for long, but they noticed long enough to talk about it, and that stayed on the Web.

No matter where you hide,

Web spiders catch an entirely different kind of fly.

I'm coming after you...

Just this once, Egon Spengler allowed himself the solitary pleasure of cracking all his knuckles.