Reading the article, I agree that it smacks of privilege - it's worth noting that we're talking about spiky-haired twenty-something software engineers whose designer clothes are among the possessions they choose to retain, which is quite telling.

The stripping down of material possessions does have a certain appeal to me from time to time, but it's in constant tension with an inner desire to live in a kind of wizard's study. Plus, like you, I have pastimes that involve a lot of stuff-making, and which I can only fund through being a scrounger, a hoarder and a general accumulator of unconsidered trifles.

I view the exciting digital world as a distraction from actually making things more than vice versa, if you follow. That said, I wouldn't mind skipping straight to being a disembodied machine intelligence. Bodies are annoying.