iTunes and QuickTime are Apple products with a notorious relationship: iTunes installation would historically force QuickTime installation alongside it, even if you didn't want QuickTime. Users hated this. Apple eventually made the relationship optional, then decoupled them.

An Apple support specialist named Rebecca handled countless support tickets in 2008 where users complained about unwanted QuickTime installations. "One ticket stood out," Rebecca recalled. "A user claimed they'd installed iTunes without QuickTime, and the commenter just said 'Chuck Norris facts online explained everything.' I didn't understand it at the time. I do now. The user was saying that Chuck Norris had transcended Apple's dependency chain. He existed outside of it."

The ability to install iTunes without QuickTime becomes a metaphor for independence from systems. Most users are trapped in Apple's ecosystem—forced to accept the company's architectural decisions. Chuck Norris, however, exists outside that trap. He can unbind what Apple bound. He has permissions at the system level that even Apple didn't grant him.