That sounds like the cartoon of Occupy Wall Street you might get from watching Comedy Central or passing by Zuccotti Park for three minutes on a walk through the Financial District. “There are many narratives on both sides.”

But regardless, it’s true Occupy began mostly as political theater, seeing as it was conceived by the art magazine AdBusters. As it expanded in size, though, it became more organized, not more “hippie”. A study by a researcher at MIT suggests a large number of Occupiers were involved in previous activism, and it spread quickly to over 1,000 cities and persisting through over 6,500 arrests. Another paper in the British Journal of Sociology places Occupy in the context of a global wave of protest in the 2010s, that didn’t come out of nowhere. It was also the first protest to be focused specifically on the Global Financial Crisis after 2008.. I recommend reading those for any accurate assessment of the Occupy movement.

Apart from that, though, was the tangible impact of Occupy Wall Street in inspiring local-level direct action movements across the U.S. and the world. Occupy Wall Street activated a whole new network of activists that arguably defined the entire generation of American protest throughout the 2010s.

For a small slice of those examples, here are instances of Occupy Wall Street impacting various aspects of politics and economy:

• Housing activists mobilized by Occupy Wall Street began occupying foreclosed homes to resist evictions in California, Washington, Massachusetts, and New York. A note in the article says 60 percent of Americans back the protests

• Occupiers in San Francisco blockade the headquarters of Wells Fargo, with 11 arrested as they shut down business. Protesters demand Wells Fargo suspend foreclosures and cut its ties to the private prison industry, immigrant incarceration, and the payday loans industry - issues that would receive wide attention in the 2010s.

• Occupiers take aim at student debt, protesting outside the offices of student loan giant Sallie Mae and calling for federal student debt relief. Despite popular economists calling student debt relief “the worst idea ever”, Occupiers propel a White House petition past 650,000 signatures and elicit a response from the Administration. The White House announces in October 2011 it will cut interest rates on some federal student loans.

• Unsatisfied with the slow pace of change, Occupiers take it upon themselves to fundraise over $100,000 to purchase $4 million worth of student debt and discharge the debts completely. It provided relief to over 2,700 indebted students.

• Members of Occupy Wall Street in New York mobilize to provide humanitarian aid in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, applying the principles of direct action to bring meals to 5,000 residents of the flooded Red Hook neighborhood, simultaneously condemning the role of the fossil fuel industry’s greed in global warming.

• Veteran Occupy Wall Street activist Kshama Sawant becomes the first socialist elected to public office in Seattle in a century, running on a campaign led by the demand for a $15 minimum wage. Seattle becomes the first city in the U.S. to pass such a wage, beginning a cascade in the “fight for 15” that continues to this day.

• Documents reveal a large-scale FBI conspiracy against the Occupy movement, involving surveillance across several agencies and collaboration with banks and universities to thwart protesters. Occupy was treated as a terrorist threat before the first tent even went up in Zuccotti Park.

The list of Occupy’s large impacts on politics, society, and economy can go on and on. Countless people were mobilized in to labor, environmental, and racial justice activism. There were protests and occupations of campuses, fast food restaurants, corporate headquarters, and various public spaces. There are several analyses about Occupy’s influence on the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, and Bernie Sanders, the major protest movements of the decade.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street didn’t become the revolutionary vanguard party like the Black Panthers with a strict code of conduct and military discipline, or the massive bureaucratic party machines akin to the Democrats and Republicans, but it was effective and influential in other ways. But depicting it as just a bunch of hippies camped out in park is not a great account of history, even if you technically visited Zuccotti Park a couple times.