Our Programming: The Speculation
While this is just speculation and doesn't affect whether our experience happened or not, we personally feel that experiences like ours are a lot more common than some people might think. That is, we feel people who were programmed by people outside of organized abuse contexts and using internet resources (particularly older conspiracy sites) - including ones who were working on a child they suspected was plural - are not exceptionally rare.
While not all of the "information" surrounding programming is true, especially things that are written like guides for how to program someone, much of what's in said information IS replicable in some way, and it strikes me as doubtful that you need special training or cooperation from others to implant commands using trauma in a young child victim you have total control over, especially if that child has already displayed signs of plurality.
Not all systems were plural from an early age, and not all of those report anything from their childhood that they feel would have clued others into the fact that they were plural. But there are also plenty of plurals who DO remember showing signs of plurality from an early age, including in a way that others would have noticed. And disordered traumagenic plurals - that is, the ones who typically have amnesia of the sort that abusers could exploit - are usually plural from an early age, often due to the actions of the people who have the most control over them.
If it's possible for someone to recognize, in hindsight, that a certain thing they did seemed to indicate plurality, it doesn't seem like a wild assumption to say it's more common than people might remember, that the adults around them might suspect that plurality. Some of those adults may not do anything about it, but some of them may try to take advantage of the system, including through methods like programming.
Furthermore, most sources I have seen on programming seem to agree that programming tends to break down around 30 years old. That is, if you were programmed but did not show signs of it before then, you will start showing signs around 30. Interestingly, it was around the 2020s that programming became more talked about in the general system community. 2020 is 30 years after 1990, the year the internet became public and that programming a child using internet resources would have even begun to be possible.
However, programming breaking down around 30 does not always translate to finding out about your programming at 30, like how you don't always get properly diagnosed right after displaying symptoms of a disorder. We were 29 when our system started getting more complex, 30 when certain "perception filters" around odd childhood memories lifted (that is, we were able to realize certain things were questionable that our adoptive father did that went unquestioned before), and 31 when we figured out it was programming.
Many people we encounter in the plural community are younger than 30 but still in roughly the same age range as us in that "the old web" with all its conspiracy sites still existed when they were born, or else the old web was a recent memory and conspiracy sites were still available in abundance on the current web. Just as our abuser copied the contents of those sites and found programming-related communities on the old web, we think other abusers may have done the same. They might even be sharing it privately over TOR, which was developed in 2002 (so the old web days).
This is not to say that I have a conspiracy saying that solo programming was definitely common thanks to the advent of the internet, but that's all to say that I simply don't think stories like mine are all that unusual or likely to be rare, and with all of these considerations in place, I think we should be more willing to accept the idea that someone can be programmed by an individual working on their own, in a way that either IS programming or is so functionally similar to it that it warrants being called by the same word.
I spend a lot of time speculating about programming, as I find that speculating helps me understand what would or wouldn't have happened to me. My speculations have helped others who are programmed and trying to understand their experiences, and I am in the process of putting together a resource on programming that includes some of this speculation, where the speculation is clearly marked as such as opposed to being fact. This speculation includes my belief that media about DID in the 1950s (e.g. The Three Faces of Eve, Psycho, Sybil, etc.) influenced cult leaders during the cult boom of the 1960s/1970s to develop methods that we would now think of as programming both in the cult indoctrination sense AND the "abusing someone into becoming plural" sense.
If anybody reading this is 18 or older and would like to talk to me about my speculation or what I know about programming (I don't feel it is responsible for me to discuss this topic with minors), I can be contacted on Discord at ".localvoid." or on Tumblr at "programmed-headmate-ideas".