You hit it on the nail. The article is actually somewhat of an advertisement. The author is signaling about his "master status" as an exemplar of this iconiclastic lifestyle. He needs to do this to sell his self-help books, tutorials, advice, etc. He also needs to gain the credibility so he is invited for talks for those mostly marketing based "Hacker Cons" where a bunch of semi believable tinkerers tell their stories about how they did something so special and mold breaking. And I don't mean technical conferences we all love. I mean the bullshit ones.