Energy, while vital, is not the only component in any part of an economy.
> Companies can't survive in a peak world without manufacturing crap. Sell more because your tools break.
This cuts both ways. If tools break too often or too easily, someone else will manufacture a tool that lasts. That tool will then sell millions or even billions of units. This can sustain a company for quite a long time.
> So now they are looking at how to do that under the premise of eternal growth
No one believes in or expects "eternal" growth. It is well known that any bubble fueled by cheap money, government bailouts, corporate welfare, or any other intervention will eventually burst. This is planned for by the very largest companies. Companies without the resources to plan for these market crashes simply do the best that they can.
> They will try to lock us down in the hardware = deprecate older hardware and force you to move to never software with TLS 1.3
I feel your pain here as an enthusiast for older hardware, but this is simply untrue. No one ever forced me to give up my ZX81, my XT, or my PPC lampshade iMac. I have them, I've kept them running, and they're fine. The XT and PPC can get online just fine either with a TLS bridge or with sites like 68k.news and frogfind.com. The constant upgrade cycle is optional. People are keep phones longer than ever. The cool-down in the PC market indicates that those enthusiasts who wanted to upgrade have done so. The heat up now is likely to be datacenters where the next wave of AMD Epyc offers a very massive energy to performance trade-off against Skylake SP. All of that said, eWaste is an issue and companies who make hardware that cannot be serviced and/or upgraded easily should probably pay a tax on it.
> Since processors now have peaked
There's plenty of room at the bottom. Seriously. I do not normally make appeals to authority because doing so is stupid, but we are talking about the most complicated machines humans have ever created. In this case, I would urge you to listen to the guy who has made these machines with extreme success: Jim Keller. He thinks we still have a long roadway of improvements before we are forced to change the industry in major ways (Gallium Arsenide or quantum or something).
> Anything manufactured today will probably have hardware kill-switches or programmed obsolescence
Already kind of illegal in some jurisdictions, and already a thing in others. Mixed bag there. However, also completely untrue as you used "anything". For example, in the automobile space you can sill get a Jeep with solid axels, a simple naturally aspirated V6, body on frame, and able to be serviced in pretty much any garage anywhere. The will to deal with tradeoffs of such a vehicle is the largest obstacle. Likewise, with computing, the willingness to deal with the tradeoffs is the problem. Do you want the best performance with most convenience? Then you likely want an M1/M2 MBP, and there you are not very serviceable. You could always get a Framework or build yourself a desktop. You can even run Linux, BSD, or Haiku if you want to make sure that your software will be serviceable by you.
In any case, the limit is on you. You can choose the locked-down products, or you can choose open platforms. Most people choose a mixture based upon their needs and preferences. The preponderance of that selfsame majority then determines the overall direction of global markets. This isn't some shadowy cabal purposefully making a system that is unsustainable, this is the consequence of an aggregate of choices that put momentum behind certain things.
