Basic standing is the floor of the whole framework: if you are a participant in the ecology, you have it simply by being alive. It is not earned by usefulness, productivity, wealth, intelligence, citizenship, popularity, or contribution, and it is yours before you do anything. It carries the entire protected core — interior sovereignty, the right to dissent, privacy, refusal, protest, bodily autonomy, access to relevant signal, and protection from being reduced to a score or a utility calculation.
Its defining property is that it is non-comparative: you have it or you don’t, and one human does not hold forty percent more of it than another. This is what distinguishes it from functional standing, which is differentiated and stacks. Holding the two apart is what lets the model have real hierarchy without ontological hierarchy — no algorithm ever decides whether a person’s existence is ecologically worthwhile, because that is not a legitimate question. See Standing.