55th IALHI Conference: AI, Big Tech and Democracy: Threats and Opportunities to Labour History Institutions

International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), 10-13 September 2025

Since ChatGPT has arrived, we can observe how labour is being affected by AI: for many, it brings along a huge time efficiency, but at the same time jobs are killed by this efficiency. AI is presented as heaven and hell at the same time. Big tech firms that have power over AI and social media, have been criticized for using this power to manipulate algorithms, putting democracy under pressure. From a progressive perspective, big tech and social media have become a threat to democratic societies and their protagonists. The left discusses how to deal with the rising “technofeudalism” and IALHI should take up that discussion.

Social media and big tech firms also affect archives and libraries: it is worth collecting social media for their strong impact on societal change and the public opinion. Additionally, libraries and archives make use of these platforms by themselves, attracting the public to their collections and activities. Tools such as AI may be a threat to employment, yet at the same time they also present opportunities for work practices at archival institutes and other workplaces. For our conference, we invite contributions on the whole range of these topics from GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) as well as from individual researchers.

Contributions may include, but should not be limited to, the following thematic clusters:

1. How do we make use of big tech?

• How do we use AI, Google services, cloud servers, and so on?
• How do we make use of social media?

2. How do we relate to big tech: threats and opportunities?

• What stand do we take as labour archives and libraries to the bias against and underrepresentation of specific positions on platforms?
• How do we deal with the circumstance that big tech firms are an infrastructural part of a capitalist structure that we cannot do without?
• How do we deal with the possible threat of losing control over our data? What role do the location of data storage and data backup play?
• How do we train our contributors and donators not to give away information they want to keep (and give it to us later)?

3. What are the consequences to our acquisition policy?

• What is to be done about bit rot – how to preserve specific ephemeral data?
• What do we win – from a heritage point of view – by capturing the volatile information of the platforms?
• To which extent can we practice kind of division of labor e.g. with the Internet Archive when it comes to collecting digital objects?

4. How do we preserve big tech inside archives and make it accessible?

• What social media and websites do we collect, and how?
• How can we assist our archival partners in their document management even before they turn over their archives?
• How can we make our collections of social media, websites etc. more visible and accessible while big tech firm’s general terms and conditions of business are very restricted?

5. What are our strategies in dealing with the challenges of big tech?

• How should we deal with false information and biased viewpoints on the platforms? Should we take up an active role of fact checkers?
• How can we make our own institutions more resilient and strengthen our donators?
• How can we act in solidarity with archives and libraries under threat?
• How can we deal with misleading information and save our own data as authentic information? 

Hands-on topics:

The conference welcomes proposals for hands-on sessions on tools and methods, in particular prototypes or first experiences. Proposals for hands-on sessions should be practically realizable on site.

Please send in your proposals with a short description of your presentation to info@ialhi.org. Use this mail also for any questions concerning the conference. Deadline is 6 June 2025.

For more information on IALHI, go to https://ialhi.org.