The gold rush analogy did not arrive as a critique. It arrived as investment wisdom — the picks-and-shovels heuristic that justified infrastructure bets when the application layer was still uncertain. What has changed is that the analogy has been fully internalized by the people it was supposed to inoculate. Essays appearing across independent publications this month are not rejecting the frame; they're to AI's current moment — an acceptance of the metaphor's accuracy paired with a rejection of the conclusion originally drawn from…